Ann Edholm »Works 2011-2021«

Mexico City, February 10, 2024 - February 17, 2024

For Ann Edholm (Stockholm, 1953), painting should be experienced
corporeally, up close, face to face, with effects similar to when two people
meet in close proximity or, to use her own words, navel to navel. Although at
first sight her work seems to dialogue mainly with minimalism and geometric
abstraction, the closer one looks at her paintings the more elements become
evident. The surfaces, apparently clean and regular, are in reality full of marks.
On the foreground, the artist seeks to reveal the painterly nature of her
works. These are not pristine images but compositions made by matter: oil,
acrylic and encaustic are applied with brushes or spatulas, and the gestures of
their application are always evident. On the edges of the paintings, and often
on the borders where different colors meet, we see small details that might
look like imperfections, or even as wounds that took place during their process
of production.

Edholm's work has deep roots in the history of European painting, not
only in twentieth-century abstraction and expressionism, but also in medieval
painting and, in general, in works of an existential or religious nature. Often,
her paintings convey experiences of strangeness, of otherness, of the uncanny.
Ann Edholm is one of the most relevant Swedish painters since the
second half of the twentieth century. In addition to having participated in solo
and group exhibitions in the most important museums of her country, she has
also had a long teaching activity—and has even been an instructor and mentor
to painters of more recent generations, among them, Paul Fägerskiöld.