Haines Gallery presents For Olle, an Andy Goldsworthy exhibition and tribute to his friend and collaborator Olle Lundberg, who recently passed away. For Olle is a meditation on materiality, memory, loss, and renewal. Using nature as an illustration of impermanence, this intimate show brings together related photographic works and a clay sculpture.
Two artists
Andy Goldsworthy was born in Cheshire, England in 1956. As a prominent practitioner of Environmental art and the Land Art movement, Goldsworthy uses twigs, stone, mud, pinecones, flowers, leaves, and other natural objects to create his earth-based sculptures. Although he has created permanent installations, Goldsworthy primarily focuses on outdoor spaces where he doesn’t have complete control of the outcome. Photography plays a large role in his work, since Goldsworthy’s pieces are built to grow and decay in their natural settings, and photography captures the transition of his work back to the earth.
Olle Lundberg (1954–2025), founder of Lundberg Design, was a San Francisco architect who focused on recycled materials. Andy Goldsworthy found in Lundberg a collaborator who shared his values regarding tactility, upcycling, and inventing works that create a relationship in harmony with nature.
‘Fallen Elm’
The focal point of this exhibition consists of three photographic diptychs from Goldsworthy’s series Fallen Elm (2009–present). The photos are ephemeral documents made in relation to a single, fallen elm tree near the artist’s home in Scotland. The tree died of Dutch elm disease and collapsed across a stream nearly two decades ago.
For many, it would seem that this is where the story ends for the fallen tree. Instead, Goldsworthy examines the tree’s slow-changing surroundings and finds renewal. Goldsworthy says, “It’s difficult to describe the tree as being dead because it has generated so much life as it has decayed. I like to think that the work I have made is also a part of the life that it has generated.”
The allows the viewer sanctuary into a private place. The woods appear in muted greens and browns, punctuated by a circle of bright yellow leaves arranged like a bouquet of flowers. The brightness provides a lively, exuberant contrast to the dark earth, and in other photos Goldsworthy has bundled the leaves in rows on top of the tree, and in another the leaves line up one by one, a yellow trail inviting us down the stream.
On view for the first time, the Fallen Elm works in For Ollie were made in November 2025 in the days following the loss of Olle Lundberg. Outside the artist’s home, a soft conversation was written. The delicate yellowed elm leaves and grass stalks arranged along the trunk of the fallen elm embody various constellations: a line, a screen, a starburst. The Fallen Elm works function as a quiet memorial from one friend to another, and the playfulness of the memories kept when everything else washes away.
‘Clay Table’
Complementing these photographs is a new sculpture created for the exhibition, Clay Table (2026). A rectangular tabletop coated in white clay creates natural patterns of cracks and fissures as the clay ages and dries over the duration of the exhibition. The cracks reveal glimpses of the table beneath and the sculpture’s inherent fragility. Dried clay works are a hallmark of Goldsworthy’s practice, symbolizing time’s effect on the beauty of the natural world.
For Olle follows the artist’s critically acclaimed retrospective, Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years (2025), organized by the National Galleries of Scotland at the Royal Scottish Academy, and coincides with his recent honor by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. In July 2026, For-Site will mark the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence with Goldsworthy’s Red Flags at the Gateway Pavilion at Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture. Red Flags interrogates our relationship with the land, with notions of territory, and with each other.
