New season – New Highlights: Linn Fernström 'Balloon Girl'

Linn Fernström Balloon Girl

The painting in the auction Ballongflicka (Girl with Balloons) exhibits many of the recurring and characteristic themes in Linn Fernström’s oeuvre. Colourful balloons, a newborn baby, a girl with large eyes, and the faint outline of the artist herself. A variety of brightly coloured birds fly across the canvas, framed by beautiful yellow martagon lilies. Despite this throng, the painting is utterly harmonic and balanced in its construction. Fernström’s painting is alive - and Ballongflicka is a superb example of this. Ballongflicka was shown at the Lars Bohman Gallery in Stockholm during the autumn of 2014. The exhibition was reviewed in the daily Svenska Dagbladet:

“She crashed onto the Swedish art scene almost 15 years ago, dividing it into two camps. Linn Fernström has undeniably aroused strong feelings every time she has stretched a piece of linen cloth across a sturdy frame and held her paintbrush against the canvas. It is easy to recognise Fernström’s hand in the new works, shown at Bohman. The formats are large, the palette rich and the brushwork is powerful. The figures resemble the ones we’ve met before. A young woman, with the artist’s features, wanders alone with her thoughts, closed off and mysterious, yet exposed to our gaze. A screaming naked baby reaches its arms towards empty space. Monkeys dance. Wide-eyed children with serious expressions, as if no one taught them how to laugh. They are all there, surrounded by gigantic budgerigars, mayflies, smaller birds and clusters of balloons. These recurrent motifs are yet to be worn out. They continue to be the bearers of enigmatic histories. Fernström’s painted worlds are ablaze with colour. If bright on the surface they are pitch-black within. There is something worryingly threatening in these scenes, oscillating between the white in the background and the blood-red that is almost dripping off the canvases.” (Extract from Joanna Persman’s review in Svenska Dagbladet, 27/8/2014)

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