A WINDOW TO PAINTING

Throughout the history of art, painting has been compared to a window to another world. On this screen we show some highlights from a hundred years of Swedish painting. Windows and landscapes are recurring themes. Worlds meet and slip in and out of each other. Fundamental to these compositions is the boundary between light and darkness.

Vera Nilsson’s painting Grandma and Little Girl from the mid-1920s shows a private moment shared by two generations. The artist herself represents the generation in between that links them. Similarly, generations of painters over the past hundred years are linked by asking the same questions: What is painting? What is a room? What is a landscape? Where is the boundary between outer and inner reality?

Like the panes in the window behind Grandma and Little Girl, Madhat Kakei’s paintings are openings into another dimension. They are often built with layers of light and shade – changes in light that are both physical and mental. Thea Ekström’s paintings are inspired by Sami drums of the kind used by a noaidi to achieve a state of trance and travel between worlds. A closer scrutiny of the surface of Ekström’s painting reveals that it is covered with signs, symbols and names. In Boï Edberg’s and Rolf Hanson’s images, the distinctly rendered outer landscape has dissolved into portrayals of an inner landscape – like the window in Clara Gesang-Gottowt’s painting Window II, which seems to look in rather than out.

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