One of Sweden’s most celebrated artists, Cecilia Edefalk’s intuitive and deeply personal practice often draws from things that she encounters in her everyday life — whether a field of dandelions, a novel or memories of visiting a church in Italy.
Edefalk’s approach fuses the intimate and the analytical. Her choice of topics often emerges from a rigorous, uncanny intuition that she hones to undertake serial explorations of a single motif, experimenting with duplication, scale, and installation. Edefalk views repetition as a means to express different ideas. She isolates transitory moments of perception, multiplying and dividing the forms that emerge from them, to create visionary meditations on nature, the mutability of time, and natural cycles of growth and decay.
Cecilia Edefalk (b.1954, Norrköping) lives and works in Stockholm. Her work received a major retrospective in 2020 at Norrköping Museum of Art and in 2016 at Prins Eugens Waldmarsudde, Stockholm. Edefalk has had numerous one person museum exhibitions at Moderna Museet, Stockholm; BAMPFA, Berkeley Art Museum; Crystal Palace, Stockholm; Parasol unit, London; The Art Institute of Chicago; Malmö Konstmuseum; Lunds Konsthall, Sweden; Kunsthalle Kiel, Germany; and Kunsthalle Bern. Her work has appeared in many groups shows at various international venues including at Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau; Moderna Museet, Malmö; Documenta 11, Kassel; the 22nd São Paolo Biennial; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco; and Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris.
Picture above:
Cecilia Edefalk’s monumental painting ”Baby” depicts a relaxed woman resting in a sea of oil paint. Edefalk began the painting in 1986 during her final year at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm and presented it in her debut exhibition at Galleri Wallner in Malmö in 1988. The painting was supplemented almost twenty years later with a filmed projection and was exhibited in the “Art Unlimited” section of ArtBasel 2006. The film shows a stationary close-up of the woman’s face and we can follow how the daylight’s reflections on the painting slowly fade away into bluish darkness. The combination of a stationary motif that is documented over a longer period of time recurs in Edefalk’s new video installation 24-Hour Venus (2009), which is currently on display in the White Lies exhibition at the Museum of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Antiquities in Stockholm.
Even though the woman in ”Baby” is centrally placed on the canvas, she is not the obvious focal point of the painting. Her figurative frame both stands out of and sinks into the surrounding paint. This calm and at the same time restless oscillating position provides the painting with an undetermined, ongoing character, which takes the form of a drama between the woman and the painter. Her expression is almost somnambulistic. Her eyes are open and yet she is absent – completely engrossed in thought. It is her face, her hands and her feet that most clearly free themselves from the paint’s saturating expansion, even though some of her body parts are not finished but hang lifelessly in the space of the paint. The woman’s body has been dissolved in favour of that of the paint.
The abrupt changes between the close inspection of the paint’s physical appearance and the overall view of the portrait create the work’s complexity. A perspectival structure, which also becomes apparent through the paint surfaces’ contemporary look, is sharply contrasted with the motif’s retrospective nature. The painting obviously operated in a temporal span already before it was supplemented by the film’s “moving” representation of itself.
”Baby” can be read as a self-portrait. Not that the motif is a depiction of Cecilia Edefalk, but the work nevertheless functions as a symbolic depiction of the painterly act. The painting reflects the artist’s intense spirit of community with the image. And the woman’s figure is employed as a tool for the viewer’s identification. The painting preserves the actions that together constitute its appearance. Such as the drawing, the paint, the palette knife’s energetic scrawls, the figuration and the size of the image. However, the most conspicuous component is perhaps the light. From where does the shimmer of life originate?
Some of Cecilia Edefalks work:
Source: Wikipedia/Galleries/tFe
