ART CITIES:Stockholm- Marie Louise Ekman
Born in Stockholm in 1944, Marie Louise Ekman was a leading protagonist among a group of artists and writers who had gathered around the radical and satirical underground magazine Puss (1968–74) in the Swedish capital. Marie Louise Ekman has succeeded in reclaiming the traditional feminine crafts in a contemporary key, especially through a rediscovery of materials and techniques generally associated with a woman’s role: weaving and ceramics.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Moderna Museet Archive
Marie Louise Ekman’s career began in 1967 and today Ekman is one of the most recognized artists in Scandinavia. The artist works with a great variety of materials: fabric, recycled objects, oil and watercolor paints, glass and wax. A strong interest in feminine themes, intimacy and introspection emerges in her works which, however, are handled in a non-conformist way. In her solo exhibition at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Marie Louise Ekman presents a large series of recent paintings, along with some 200 works from the late ‘60s and onwards. This is the first presentation since 1998 of her entire oeuvre. And, like Marie-Louise Ekman herself alternates between art, theatre and film, allowing one to inform the other, the artist’s films and works for the stage will be included as essential parts of the exhibition. Since her debut exhibition, at Galleri Karlsson in Stockholm in 1968, Ekman has responded to the popular culture of Sweden’s postwar social democratic society, centred on the so-called people’s home. She did so from both the perspective of a young woman and of a child. Even at this early stage, her repertoire was wide: her art , a unique mix of naive and Pop art combined with surrealist elements, drew from labels on jars, comics, satirical political drawings The melancholic carnival of a proto bad-girl and fashion accessories. She elevated the styles and colours of a girl’s bedroom to an aesthetic and made tinkering a method, like the Plexiglas box “Minnie Sees Food” (1967) and “Cupboard II” (1971). When, in 1968, Pontus Hultén bought her newly finished “Fish Balls in Lobster Sauce” (1968) for the Moderna Museet’s collection, a modern working-class dish rendered in silk appliqué became a local pop icon with a feminist touch. The series “Home at a Lady” (1973) presents the home itself as a stage. The (blonde) lady, a character that also appears in many other of Ekman’s paintings, is seen here in a sparsely furnished living room in which two of the three pink walls are made of fake fur. This prim character is accompanied by a television, a man and a dog who are engaged in different bodily activities, such as eating, peeing, vomiting and having sex. Such work was not accepted by Sweden’s modernist establishment, nor by the women’s movement, who found Ekman’s representations of women too passive and prone to the consumption of commercial culture or to immersing themselves in sexual fantasies, and during the ‘70s her work was also provocative in political cultural circles. Her posters, one for example, showing a woman daydreaming about oral sex, were banned from the bookshop Oktober for not being helpful enough in the struggle against capitalism.
Info: Curator: Jo Widoff, Moderna Museet, Skeppsholmen, Stockholm, Duration: 17/6-17/9/17, Days & Hours: Tue & Fri 10:00-20:00, Wed-Thu 10:00-18:00, Sat-Sun 11:00-17:00, www.modernamuseet.se
