Baum

Andreas Eriksson , Baum, 2010 © Andreas Eriksson / Bildupphovsrätt 2010

Andreas Eriksson

Andreas Eriksson’s monumental paintings are overwhelming in their rich detail and disparate painterly styles. They are at once rapidly taken in and difficult to overview. The focus in the works shifts in time with the movements of the eye. The events spread across the entire canvas – not in even progression but in an unbroken distribution of meanings.

Where Eriksson previously worked with a deft display of techniques divided into separate canvases – his more recent paintings combine the conclusions made in these explorations. The result consists of considerably more complex and serious observations.

In two of the exhibited works, sketches for a tree trunk are perceptible. Under the veils of thin paint that has formed into beads due to the oilier underpainting, we discern drawn shapes indicating “branches”. Everyday experience, a gaze aimed at nature and the domestic environment has, for many years, been the starting point for Eriksson’s oeuvre. His way of creating “landscapes” oscillates between mood, metaphor and narrative. In these two paintings, however, the figurative is merely suggested. The layers of colour in what could be seen as the background merge with the foreground. The surface of the painting bears distinct traces of activity from brushes and palette knives. Andreas Eriksson continues to pursue his fascination with the grammar of painting. The size of the paintings establishes a veritably physical concordance with the viewer. There is a sense of meeting an equal in a finely-tuned exchange of experiences.

Andreas Eriksson

Born 1975 in Björsäter
Lives and works in Medelplana

Education

1993–98 Kungl. Konsthögskolan, Stockholm

Selected solo exhibitions

2009 Roundabout the Hardship of Believing, Galleri Riis, Oslo [NO]
2008 Walking the Dog, Lying on the Sofa, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Wien/Vienna [AT]
2007 Art 38 Basel, Art Statements, Basel [CH]

Selected group exhibitions

2009 Momentum 2009 – 5th Nordic Biennale of Contemporary Art, Moss [NO]
2009 Livsformer, Bonniers konsthall, Stockholm
2009 Distant Nearness – Nature in Contemporary Art, Kunstmuseum Bonn [DE]

Selected bibliography

Walking the dog, Lying on the Sofa, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, WienVienna, 2008.
Round About the Pipeline Tree, Astra Zeneca, 2007.
Cosimo, Blå Himmel Förlag, 2006.

More about this exhibition