Voices / Röster

In Voices / Röster, Ann Edholm brings together significant works from the early 1990s and a new body of paintings from this year that mark a new phase in her practice. Together, they reveal the richness and force of her distinctive, physically engaged approach to abstraction, while highlighting her significant position within Swedish and European painting. Image as Act, the title of two large-scale canvases, can be seen as emblematic of the new works. Edholm developed each painting individually through the painterly process itself, correlating them to the human body. They demand an active, bodily engagement – “from navel to navel,” as Edholm explains – to fully grasp their subtle complexity and contrasting painterly effects. In Image as Act, vivid red “zips” run horizontally across the canvases as evenly as lines on a page, while smoky gestures of black color seem to press against the grid from behind. Depending on the viewer’s perspective and the interplay of light, the black shifts in depth and tonality, revealing an intricate web of traces and allusions. With her often large-scale paintings, Edholm enters a traditionally male-dominated field. She engages in a dialogue with movements such as Abstract Expressionism, Color Field painting, and Suprematism, while finding a language entirely her own to translate the unspeakable into a personal and immediately compelling form. Wedge-like compositions that can be read as blades or spikes, or precisely drawn stripes, convey through their regular repetition an impression of clarity, rigor, and force. In contrast, visible, irregular painterly gestures or richly textured surfaces made with the spatula create a charged sense of polarity. Edholm, who described her works as things of paint, sometimes adds materials such as vinyl to her pigments to produce opaque surfaces. Applied in multiple layers, these emerge in works like the two different sized canvases titled Röster / Voices, as sharply defined forms overlaying the background. They convey a sense of physical complexity and generate the impression of a before and beyond – a contradictory tension between two-dimensional transcendence and materiality. Edholm addresses both personal and collective traumas, as well as the dark and luminous parts of human existence. She captures the subtle nuances in which the forgotten and suppressed fragments of our lives resonate. Through the tension between physical and two-dimensional impressions, the interplay of light and dark, the artist makes palpable the ambivalence inherent in the human condition. With her distinguished abstraction, refined over decades, she makes the unutterable and transcendent visible where language fails.