Maria Friberg: Almost There #5

Photo: Courtesy of the artist

Maria Friberg’s photographic work Almost There #5, installed in the Senior Executive Vice President's office, presents a group of young men in business suits, floating in a swimming pool. Captured in a moment of suspension — arms adrift, bodies neither rising nor sinking — they appear detached from gravity, purpose, and control. The work's painterly quality evokes romantic and symbolic traditions in art. In particular, the image recalls 19th-century depictions of figures in water as metaphors for spiritual or emotional states — most famously in Millais’ Ophelia. But Friberg’s floating men seem to hover in a different kind of uncertainty: between ambition and collapse, confidence and vulnerability, success and failure.

The suited figure has long been a recurring subject in Maria Friberg’s practice. Since the 1990s, she has explored masculinity, power, and identity through carefully staged photographic art and video works. In her compositions, symbols of corporate life are often shown in unfamiliar or dreamlike settings. Rather than reinforcing traditional images of authority, Friberg’s men often appear uncertain, introspective, even fragile.

The suit suggests a corporate or professional identity, but in Almost There #5 that identity is literally adrift. The men are "almost there" — but where “there” is, remains open. The ambiguity invites reflection not just on individual roles, but on collective states of ambition, pressure, and belonging.

SSE has four artworks by Maria Friberg in the permanent collection: Alongside Us #2 in room Estrid, Changed Position in the northern staircase (the man sitting on a pile of shirts), Somewhere else in the Board Room and Almost There #5 installed in the Senior Executive Vice President's office. Through theese works, Maria Friberg makes room for a broader, more nuanced understanding of masculinity — one in which vulnerability is not hidden, but integral to the image. Her works continue to inspire critical dialogue on the values, structures, and symbols that shape our society.