KRISTINA ERIKSSON
24 SEPTEMBER – 25 OCTOBER 2020
REVIEWED BY
DAGENS NYHETER
14 OCTOBER 2020
KUNSTKRITIKK
29 SEPTEMBER 2020
Endurance
”I look and look and look at them for hours, days and months till I see whether I can put up with them. Or, rather, endure them.”
The last time Kristina Eriksson was prominent in a major presentation in Stockholm was at the Sven-Harrys konstmuseum in 2011, then together with Torsten Andersson. The Dagens Nyheter review described Eriksson’s part in the exhibition as “one of the year’s most unassuming and bewildering”. Shown then were drawings that had arisen almost as a testimony of grief over the departure of her life companion Torsten Andersson. This was art as experience undergone. Her painting has since become more and more particular and reduced.
The works now on show at Anna Bohman Gallery represent Eriksson’s production between 2015 and 2020. Her motives are objects seemingly simply portrayed, a flower shape, diffuse forms or other more indeterminate figures. They are ideas of objects rather than representations. The content of the paintings is worked over again and again, reduced more and more, condensed till finally a “distillate” remains.
The small flowers are a recurring theme. Though small they are never trivial. They have their own self’s history to tell. While similar to one another there is nothing repetitive about them. Rather, they are individuals of the same presented family; they turn up against varying backgrounds and differing circumstances, of which some can only be imagined, like a faint shadow or a memory. Gunnar Ekelöf expresses this exactly: “It’s often like this with great and very personal painters, that similar things give each other depth rather than appearing as a repetition”. They should best be experienced together.
Were one to characterize her work method it can perhaps be described as the art of resignation. About working from a zero-ed position, to avoid all pretention. In her own words, the bottom is a good position, from there it can only get better. Her art has an air of inescapability, striking in its resignation, nothing for the faint-hearted. But it also inspires trust. As Eriksson says: do I want to see this work in front of me when I’m dying?
For it matters not how well you do something, sooner or later it’s all over. In the end the ideas will also stop coming. It is over now. Says Kristina. To take away what is inessential. The quick-and-easy. The less time we have left, the more important what we achieve becomes, and this perhaps is what’s so hard to bear.
Kristina Eriksson does not leave us alone in our enduring.
Eva Asp, independent curator
Kristina Eriksson's works has been shown at Sven-Harrys konstmuseum, Stockholm, Thielska Galleriet, Stockholm, Halmstads konsthall, Konstmuseet i Skövde, Thomas Wallner, Simris, Galleri Lars Bohman, Stockholm, Galleri Sylvia Enget, Stockholm, Galleri Arnstedt, Östra Karup etc
Kristina Eriksson's work is in the permanent collection of Moderna Museet, Malmö Konstmuseum, Dunkers kulturhus and in private collections such as Bonnier portrait collection, Nedre Manilla, Stockholm etc
Photo Mathias Johansson
