Artist:

Marie-Louise Ekman, born in Stockholm in 1944, is an important Swedish contemporary artist, film director, playwright and cultural figure. Active since the late 1960s, she works across painting, sculpture, film, theater, stage design and installation. Moderna Museet notes the freedom with which she has moved between these disciplines throughout her career.

The most distinctive feature of her work is the way she turns seemingly cute, innocent, domestic images into a kind of absurd psychological theater. Rooms, beds, tables, people, animals, floral wallpaper, and family scenes often appear, but these elements do more than evoke warmth: they expose the awkwardness, desires, power relations, gender roles, and emotional predicaments of everyday life. Moderna Museet also notes that her work reveals the absurdity of daily life and unsettles social constructs.

Ekman's early career was connected to Sweden's counterculture and satirical publishing circles of the 1960s and 1970s. She was an important figure around Stockholm's underground satirical magazine Puss. This background lends her work an anti-authoritarian, irreverent resistance to bourgeois taste. Rather than decorous art to admire as beautiful, it makes viewers laugh while wondering whether it is about their own home, relationships or awkward life—a mischievous kind of charm.

Her importance extends beyond museums. Ekman has served as president of the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts and as head of Sweden’s Royal Dramatic Theatre, Dramaten; she is also an artist, director, playwright, and cultural administrator. A profile from the Stockholm School of Economics likewise describes her as an artist, playwright, director, and writer who has held important positions at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and the Royal Dramatic Theatre.

Artwork title: “Till min älskade”

Poster size: 50*70cm

Original poster from an art museum

This poster is connected to Moderna Museet's major 2017 retrospective. Held in Stockholm from June 17 to September 17, 2017, the exhibition featured nearly 350 works and was, at the time, the largest presentation of her career.

What makes Till min älskade most captivating is the way it places “love” in a distinctly Ekman-like interior. The title sounds like a love letter, but the image is less a conventional picture of romantic love than a stage: the room, figures, furniture, bed, and everyday objects all become part of a psychological state. Rather than painting love as idealized happiness, she presents it as a scene of everyday life that is intimate, a little absurd, and even somewhat lonely.

This is also an important characteristic of Marie-Louise Ekman: she uses a simple, childlike, almost illustrative language to address subjects that are actually very complex. Love, family, the body, gender, private life, loss, and everyday exhaustion often appear in her work not as weighty subjects, but in a seemingly lighthearted, even slightly comical way. The effect is something like this: the image is charming, but the longer you look, the more you sense its sting.

Original poster; size and framing options are listed above.

Marie-Louise Ekman, born in Stockholm in 1944, is an important Swedish contemporary artist, film director, playwright and cultural figure. Active since the late 1960s, she works across painting, sculpture, film, theater, stage design and installation. Moderna Museet notes the freedom with which she has moved between these disciplines throughout her career.

The most distinctive feature of her work is the way she turns seemingly cute, innocent, domestic images into a kind of absurd psychological theater. Rooms, beds, tables, people, animals, floral wallpaper, and family scenes often appear, but these elements do more than evoke warmth: they expose the awkwardness, desires, power relations, gender roles, and emotional predicaments of everyday life. Moderna Museet also notes that her work reveals the absurdity of daily life and unsettles social constructs.

Ekman's early career was connected to Sweden's counterculture and satirical publishing circles of the 1960s and 1970s. She was an important figure around Stockholm's underground satirical magazine Puss. This background lends her work an anti-authoritarian, irreverent resistance to bourgeois taste. Rather than decorous art to admire as beautiful, it makes viewers laugh while wondering whether it is about their own home, relationships or awkward life—a mischievous kind of charm.

Her importance extends beyond museums. Ekman has served as president of the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts and as head of Sweden’s Royal Dramatic Theatre, Dramaten; she is also an artist, director, playwright, and cultural administrator. A profile from the Stockholm School of Economics likewise describes her as an artist, playwright, director, and writer who has held important positions at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and the Royal Dramatic Theatre.