Fiskbullar i hummersås

Marie-Louise Ekman has been prominent in various capacities on the Swedish arts scene since the 1960s. She is a visual artist, working in textiles, painting, sculpture and on paper. Ekman has also written and directed her own dramas on stage and in films, and was professor of painting and later vice-chancellor of the Royal Institute of Art. In 2009-2014, Ekman was the director of the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, a mission she took on as an artistic project, causing controversy by focusing on workplace relations and psychology.

As an artist, Marie-Louise Ekman is wildly eclectic, mixing references from art history, comics and everyday life, often with weird and bizarre results. Surface and line are central to her style, and pink is a dominating colour, as seen in this silk application, Fish Cakes in Lobster Sauce. She describes pink as “the colour of meat, man’s true colour under the skin”. Taking a classic Swedish canned food with gourmet pretensions as her subject, Marie-Louise Ekman demonstrates her ever-present sense of humour.