Marie-Louise Ekman

Marie-Louise Ekman is without doubt one of the most unique contemporary artists in Sweden today. Her stylistic consistency is striking. She has such a distinct visual lan-guage that is unmistakably hers, and an artistic practice that remains timeless and always topical.
Ekman borrows everyday environments and situations and makes them her own. In an experimental fashion she combines the absurd and the surreal in recognisable settings. In the painting, Sovrummet II, she moves unimpeded across boundaries into new worlds and scenes. Her imagery is filled with art historical references mixed with elements of popular culture.
Her artistic practice has been greatly marked by her anarchic and perceptive assault on normality, which can be seen in the scope of her work. It is this that allowed her to be-come part of the circle around the influential underground magazine Puss.
Ekman has a diverse practice in which she likes to return to certain images and contexts. There is hardly a motif or a figure that does not turn up in several other scenes or that one gets acquainted with more than once. At first you encounter them in objects and paint-ings, then later in films, TV series and radio shows. Even if the medium changes Ekman has kept returning to the same topics and style for several decades now – and as a result her art always seems surprisingly youthful.