CANDIDATE 2004
Andreas Eriksson
born 1975 in Lidköping and lives in Stockholm and Lidköping.
Andreas Eriksson draws on various movements in modernism in painting. He not only borrows a specific earlier tradition, but also dismantles, analyses and combines the whole spectrum into a new unholy alliance. When he is working he is not tied to any a particular method, but finds a medium that matches each of his challenges and subject matters. Eriksson is best known for his multi-part painting installations, which repeat a few thematic elements. An essential concern is also the spatial presentation of the paintings. The different parts of the painting installations echo various genres of modernist painting, from expressive colour painting to geometric abstraction and on to postminimalist deployment of space. In them we can see references equally to computer graphics and to 3D-modelling. In 2002, curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist chose Eriksson to be in the Urgent Painting exhibition. This was shown in the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.
Recently his production has been moving in an increasingly conceptual direction. Eriksson's exhibition of last year, en andra gång (a second time), at Galleri Flach in Stockholm, depicted his critical relationship with our increasingly technological society. The exhibition's starting point was an event that changed the artist's life: hypersensitisation to electricity when he was speaking into a mobile phone in a bullet train. He had to move away from electric pollution. The theme of the exhibition in fact emerges as being the contemporary individual's split lifestyle: the simultaneity of corporeal and electric or virtual reality. The exhibition's diptych paintings, including some made with acid-based solvent on copper sheets, dealt with various light phenomena. The message of the exhibition was condensed into two sculptural elements. Eriksson combined an experience of electrical interference with the tree Yggdrasil familiar from Nordic mythology. The artist had sawed through the trunk of the tree and cut it into slices. Out of these wooden disks he built in the gallery space two similar half-size trees. Björn Springfeldt writes about the exhibition: "The trees seemed to be turning their backs to the viewers and groping at the walls as if trying to find a way out. Here questions were once again posed with regard to modern life and progress. Could a reconstruction be possible?" By presenting his experience as a work Eriksson updated the metaphysical presumptions or added value often linked with visual art and the art object. As an art act it can also be interpreted as showing art's ability to duplicate or multiply reality. One of Eriksson's motives is in fact an investigation of the boundary conditions for artistic representation.
Leevi Haapala