Rita Lundqvist, Galleri Lars Bohman, Stockholm

Rita Lundqvist
Galleri Lars Bohman, Stockholm
January 11 - February 22, 2003

Galleri Lars Bohman presents an exhibition by RITA LUNDQVIST. In this second exhibition at the gallery, she presents a series of new paintings.

Rita Lundqvist employs a reductive vocabulary of forms and images to create minimal compositions that suggest mysterious narratives. Flat geometric forms describe landscapes whose dominant feature is usually a single linear horizon. Figures and objects are set within these landscapes, themselves rendered as a formal combination of geometric elements.

Figures, or characters that are uniform in scale and perspective and vary only slightly in gesture and position populate Rita Lundqvist’s canvases. Within the context of this compositional repetition, the figures deconstruct as symbols and themselves become formal elements. The characters’ divergent activities and the situations they find themselves in have usually been suggested by a single object, or prop. In the new paintings, however, there are more characters and fewer props, which gives rise to a greater interaction.

Stories are suggested and at times absurd scenarios are hinted at. Three girls running. Four figures watch a girl floating in the air. Girls and boys walk up a hill. Two girls making a fence. Moments apparently stolen from a greater narrative, as if they are illustrations borrowed from a mythical tale. But the larger narratives are merely suggested and are not as important as the exact moment they depict. It is as if Rita Lundqvist is working with the methodology of storytelling and picture making, and by extracting a single moment from the narrative, she reduces the picture to its most basic essence. The references to folk painting and the lack of context and the disjointedness between the deadpan humour and activity also evoke the work of the Surrealists.

Born in Hässleholm, Sweden in 1953, Rita Lundqvist lives and works in Stockholm. She attended the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm (1980-1985). In 2000 she was elected to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts.

In 2002 the first presentation of her work was made in the USA in the project space at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York. Other recent exhibitions include: The Carnegie Art Award for Nordic Painting (2001), The Edstrand Foundation Art Prize 2000, Rooseum, Malmö, Sweden, Norrköpings Konstmuseum, Norrköping, Sweden, and Krognoshuset, Lund, Sweden.

GALLERI LARS BOHMAN
Karlavägen 16, 114 31 Stockholm
www.gallerilarsbohman.com