CANDIDATE 2004
Carin Ellberg
Born 1959 in Stockholm, lives in Stockholm.
Carin Ellberg's drawings, paintings and object installations occupy the world of the home. This familiar realm has been brought together by children, games and chores. And, at the same time, nothing in Ellberg's works is what it at first appears to be. By leaps and bounds, everyday life becomes art, a distorted everyday. In these works the atmosphere is as though Pippi Longstocking had become a housewife. Ellberg's works can be said to be an offshoot from the tradition of surrealism. In them we can see echoes of the metamorphoses of Louise Bourgeois' drawings, or equally of Niki de Saint-Phalle's brightly coloured, generous female figures, or Marie-Louise Ekman's milieu pictures. Ellberg's works successfully mingle play with art, humour with the fundamental, and emancipation with kitsch. And that is precisely why her works appear to turn the everyday upside down, to make it significant. They bring together the home and the sphere of art in the specificness of a female viewpoint.
In the 1980s, Ellberg also made video and filmworks. Köket (The Kitchen), 1987, made together with Katarina Lindgren, treated being a housewife as a counterforce to the efficiency ideas of economic life. Other moving-image works include Besöket (The Visit), Pin-Ball and Eilen from 1988, plus Modersmål (Mother Tongue), 1989. In the works these materials are surprisingly transformed and take on new meanings - from modelling clay into pigments and from toys into nylon tights. We can see a connection with naivism in the childlikeness and directness of Ellberg's drawings. The drawings continue with the lightness of telephone-pad doodles, echoing schoolgirlish daydreams. Meanwhile, as a painter, Ellberg represents 1990s 'bad painting'. The emphasis is on speed of thought, on spontaneous expression and on recording the authenticity of the moment. Ellberg has created a diary-like series of self-portraits made up of hundreds of paintings, out of all of which there peers a half-length portrait of a somewhat frightened housewife.
The most conceptual and most elegant aspect of Carin Ellberg's production is represented by her landscape installations. It looks as though the figures in the drawings have been embodied in reliefs moulded out of silicon and pigment. The brightly coloured elfs flow along the walls or floor like the Barbababas beloved of children. Also in the guise of fairytale characters are Bauhaus triangles, circles and squares. The elfs form organic regions, seas and lakes; they grow into trees of life or put out amoeba-like tentacles to touch the architectonic structures assembled or piled up out of wooden blocks. In Ellberg's installations formal elements and fairytale characters intertwine together, forming a domestic geography of fantasy. Play and song ring out and life becomes art.
Leevi Haapala