First out was 1953, followed by the Second Deal - now it is time for the third selection from the Fredrik Roos Nordic Collection, this time under the heading Lattice & Roots.

Lattice is the name of a much acclaimed room installation the sculpture Stina Ekman showed at the Moderna Museet in the spring of 1985. It is the result of what she called "an intuitive investigation of the number of sculptures which fit within the cube 60X60X60 mm". In a defined, brightly lit room, hundreds of small sculptures have been arranged on all planes in a strictly geometrical pattern. All shapes, heavy monolithes as well as brittle shells in turquoise shimmering bronze, and strictly geometrical, slightly aggressive solids in blasted aluminum, or flambuoyant crowns and swelling, organic forms in black velvety balsa wood, are all contained within the imaginary limits of the little cube.

In this installation, which was acquired in 1988 in it's entirety by Fredrik Roos, a number of questions are put forward about the nature of perception, about formalism and freedom, and the relation between "abstraction" and "representation" that bring matters to a head. But ultimately, an existentialist interpretation comes to mind: from the insignificant cube, so small it goes into a hand, an infinite number of variations and possibillities emerges. "There are as many possibilities in our lives", Stina Ekman writes in a commentary; "you always have to choose what you want to see and where you want to go".

The second part of the title of the exhibition, Roots, refers to the tree-like structure the Fredrik Roos Nordic Collection actually has. The large group of artists shown in the previous exhibitions were all born in the 1950's. But, the collection also holds works by the artists who have been this group's teachers, mentors and sources of inspiration, as well as a small collection of older artists who, in turn, were these artist's teachers.

Among them we meet the legendary trio of professors from the Royal Academy of Art in Stockholm: Evert Lundquist, Lennart Rohde and Philip von Schantz, whose classical, French inspired views on art during the 60's were passed on to the middle generation of artists like Jan Håfström, Lena Cronqvist, Harald Lyth, Lennart Aschenbrenner, Claes Eklundh, and P G Thelander.

Ten years later, in the 70's, in the studio of Jan Håfström, one could meet several of the artists we have shown in previous exhibitions, like the Wallda Group (Max Book, Eva Löfdahl, Stig Sjölund) or Håkan Rehnberg and Johan Scott. At that time, Rolf Hansson visited Dick Bengtsson in Hälsingland, and Anders Widoff (who studied with Ola Billgren at Forum in Malmö) made a movie about Erland Cullberg. So, yet another part of our contemporary history seen through the Fredrik Roos Nordic Collection.