Salad Days is a sticky, sunburnt dive into the mythology of youth — not as it was, but as we wish it had been. Through cartoon logic, brawls in resin, and bite-sized icons caught mid-meltdown, Oliver reimagines innocence as a performance: staged, exaggerated, and permanently suspended in high summer.
Here, the bite of an apple isn’t just temptation — it’s timing. A split second before the fall. A frozen frame of pleasure, rot, and bright red longing. The exhibition is populated by softened punchlines and violent sweetness — abstract tumbles, swollen colors, and characters teetering between joy and collapse.
Drawing from childhood symbols, commercial mascots, and Renaissance moods gone sideways, the works in Salad Days hover in a state of beautiful confusion. A sugar crash in slow motion. A fight scene in a fruit bowl.
This isn’t a return to youth. It’s a remix of its leftovers.
Salad Days is Oliver Sundqvist’s second solo show at Public Service Gallery and will take place in the Vault space. Sundqvist’s first show, Symphony Hour took place in 2023.
