Ann Edholm

How does that information affect our perception of her painting? Perhaps it sharpens our awareness of its dual spatial orientation. That the painting refers partly to a room that is absent – the original studio where it is no longer located. But also – and perhaps more significantly – that the painting stakes out its space here in the museum and becomes a physical experience that we perceive bodily. With its graphic clarity, it also takes possession of our gaze aimed at it. Where in the painting is that relationship most distinct?

This could be nowhere but in the colour. In the material body of the painting, which stretches across the entire canvas. In the orange splinters directed at one another, aiming their sharp points at the chasm of darkness that opens between them. At once repellently hard and enticingly soft. At close range, the clarity of the painting is appropriated by the lively surface of the paint. Ann Edholm has employed her intimate knowledge of materials and the history of painting to develop a unique imagery. Her abstract signs are derived from a perception of some sort of egalitarian relationship between human being and painting. It harbours reminiscences from such disparate sources as the children’s stories of Elsa Beskow, Paul Celan’s poetry after the Holocaust and details from historic paintings. In Übergang the silent whinny from the horse’s mouth in Picassos Guernica (1937) reverberates. The meaning of the tongue’s triangle is found in Ann Edholm’s violently orange spikes.

Ann Edholm

Born 1953 in Saltsjöbaden, Stockholm
Lives and works in Stockholm and Lid, Nyköping

Education

1981–1986 Kungl. Konsthögskolan, Stockholm
1980–1981 Gerlesborgsskolan, Stockholm
1977–1978 Gerlesborgsskolan, Stockholm

Selected group exhibitions

2010 End of Passion, Maria Stenfors, London [UK]
2009 Back of Silence, Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin [DE]
2008 Tungan på ordet, Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm

Selected group exhibitions

2009 The Facades Project, T.I.C.A.B. – Tirana International Contemporary Art Biennial, Tirana [AL]
2006 Språk är ett virus från yttre rymden, Norrköpings Konstmuseum, Norrköping
1995 Im Licht des Nordens: Positionen Schwedischer Malerei von 1873–1995, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt am Main [DE]

Bibliography

Lars-Erik Hjerström Lappalainen, ”Bortom bildens och hitom objektets rum: Seende och tänkande i det haptiska rummet”, Carl Fredrik Hårleman (red./ed.), Ann Edholm & Håkan Rehnberg, Eskilstuna, Stockholm: Eskilstuna Konstmuseum, Millesgården, 2006.
Annika Nordin, ”Möte med mänskliga mått”, Isabella Nilsson (red./ed.), Ann Edholm, Uppsala, Kristinehamn: Uppsala Konstmusuem, Kristinehamns konstmuseum, 2003.
Tom Sandqvist (red./ed.), Ann Edholm, Stockholm: Raster Förlag, 2000.