Abstract Expressionist Clyfford Still once said, “No painting stops with itself, is complete of itself. It is a continuation of previous paintings and is renewed in successive ones.” This is the approach Agneta Ekholm takes with her work. Each new painting is a response to the last, a confluence of the past and present. “I always look at my work as a continuous flow,” she says. “I see it as following on from previous works.”
This process is intuitive for Ekholm, who sees where inspiration takes her in layered, abstract canvases that engage with both the formal and technical elements of painting, alongside the organic nature of making marks on canvas. The Finland-born artist’s 25-year practice is a response to the world around her. Having moved from the city to the water in Ocean Grove, Victoria, during pandemic years, Ekholm has found the new setting conducive to creating: “I have become a better artist by being closer to nature and water.”
Such an influence is not necessarily explicit in the output to canvas though. Some paintings echo the vague suggestion of landscape, but much of her work is purely imaginative, something of a dreamscape. The environmental setting is mainly used to offer stillness, so Ekholm can create without distraction. “Silence takes time to learn, to understand and appreciate,” she says. “And it takes time to become silent yourself.”
Her large-scale abstract paintings showing at Flinders Lane Gallery are up for audience interpretation. “It always surprises me that each person sees something different in my work,” Ekholm says. But for her, they are another part of the creative process: “I see my work as a research project. I have a desire to reach into the unknown with each new painting.”
Confluence
Agneta Ekholm
Flinders Lane Gallery
26 September—14 October
This article was originally published in the September/October 2023 print edition of Art Guide Australia.
Suggested Reading
The systems that connect us with Dana Harris and Peter Atkins
In their first joint exhibition together, the couple Dana Harris and Peter Atkins share their separate three-year-long projects made during the Melbourne lockdowns, delivering a shared interest in geometry and colour in SUPERsystems at TarraWarra Museum of Art.
Andrew Stephens
Mosman Art Trail follows the footsteps of famous artists
The brand new 10km Mosman Art Trail features landmarks that have inspired generations of artists, including Arthur Streeton, Margaret Preston, Susan Rothwell and Jasper Knight. With accompanying reproductions of artworks at various sites on the walk, it’s a chance to reflect how artists interpret the landscape.
Briony Downes
The Long Run #5: Suzanne Archer on responding to life
“I guess that is the thread, that I am very open to influences that come into my life, you know, and I respond to them,” says Suzanne Archer in The Long Run, Art Guide’s latest podcast series featuring interviews with artists who have 60-year practices.
Tiarney Miekus
How we remember tomorrow considers the sea as memory
An exhibition at UQ Art Museum centres the relationship between culture, tradition and the ocean, and illuminates how intergenerational storytelling, tied to oceanic themes, might subvert settler-colonial narratives.
Barnaby Smith
A rising in the east explores Japanese arts and disability
A collaboration between Perth Festival, DADAA gallery and studio, and four Japanese arts and disability organisations has resulted in A rising in the east—an exhibition that asks what artists with disabilities can achieve when offered the resources.
Barnaby Smith
Talking pageantry with Scotty So
Endlessly inventive, the work of Hong Kong-born, Melbourne-based artist Scotty So spans photography, painting, video work, and drag performance. With a dual exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ballarat, So talks about pageantry, begonias and queens.