Overview
Eriksson is known for his poetic depictions of the natural world, describing them as “existential landscapes”. Encompassing a wide range of media, this exhibition offers a unique window onto the artist’s experience of his rural surroundings in Medelplana, Sweden.
Nordic Watercolour Museum, Tjörn presents a solo exhibition of watercolours, drawings and hand-woven textiles by Swedish artist Andreas Eriksson. The show includes works from an ongoing series of large-scale handwoven tapestries, rendered in subtle hues of undyed linen yarn. In a Berlin studio that houses five traditional looms, Eriksson collaborated with a team of weavers trained at Stockholm’s historic Handarbetets Vänner textile school. Making a sketch or using an existing painting to plot the composition of his tapestries, the weavers interpreted these ‘maps’ with specific guidance from the artist regarding thread, density and technique. Taking two years to produce, at a rate of perhaps a centimetre or two a day, this painstaking mode of production reflects the artist’s enduring interest in the passing of time.
Andreas Eriksson was born in 1975 in Björsäter, Sweden. He lives and works in Medelplana on the south bank of Lake Vänern, Sweden. Eriksson’s fourth solo exhibition at Stephen Friedman Gallery, London ‘Mapping memories, tracing time’ opened in March 2020. Eriksson’s works are included in prominent collections internationally including: Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; FRAC, Auvergne, France; MUMOK, Vienna, Austria; Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo, Norway; Gothenburg Museum of Art, Gothenberg, Sweden; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; Skövde Art Museum, Skövde, Sweden; National Public Art Council, Sweden; Sundsvall Museum, Sundsvall, Sweden and Uppsala Art Museum, Uppsala, Sweden.
Eriksson is known for his poetic depictions of the natural world, describing them as “existential landscapes”. Encompassing a wide range of media, this exhibition offers a unique window onto the artist’s experience of his rural surroundings in Medelplana, Sweden.
Nordiska Akvarellmuseet
Södra hamnen 6
471 32 Skärhamn
Sweden
Installation Views
"It is impossible to trace any topography, scenery or perspective in Eriksson’s [works]. They have a strong hallucinatory power in that their lack of north- or southward orientation produces a disjunction, making it hard to understand where the sky and the ground lie."
– Filipa Ramos
Review for Frieze magazine of 'Roundabouts', solo exhibition, Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden, 2014
“Intuition – let your imagination play; that can open up wonderful adventures for you as I feel it and new ways of perceiving things. All sorts of embarrassing, funny, lovely moments bubble up in that dialogue with your painting.”
– Andreas Eriksson
"Territories of the finished tapestries might be distinguished by a particular knotted texture or the strands of long fibre sprouting from the surface. Andreas has described the tapestries as ‘existential landscapes’. We might also see them as a conceptual extension of painting in which the picture migrates to the canvas itself."
– Hettie Judah (regular contributor to The Guardian, Frieze, New York Times)
ANDREAS ERIKSSON b. 1975, Björsäter, Sweden
Andreas Eriksson’s artistic practice is highly expansive, encompassing a wide range of media including painting, photography, sculpture, tapestry and installation. Eriksson’s works often appear quiet and understated yet belie a poetic quality which has a lasting effect on the viewer. Since 2000 the artist has lived in a house situated in the midst of a forest on the edge of a lake. Small events and phenomena from his everyday life and the natural world that surrounds him become the outset for his works, giving his formal, conceptual, metaphorical and perceptual decision-making process a firm context.
Eriksson's work often embraces dualities such as inside and outside, lightness and heaviness, illusion and reality. His work hovers enigmatically between the abstract and the figurative, and is simultaneously familiar and mysterious. The emotional intensity with which Eriksson imbues his work is the result of a sustained exploration of his response to the natural world. Eriksson’s fourth solo exhibition at Stephen Friedman Gallery, London ‘Mapping memories, tracing time’ opened in March 2020.
