Anyone who has been to Scandinavia knows the unique atmosphere and beauty of its light and overwhelming nature. Not surprisingly, the relationship between space and light has inspired many artists there. This light and landscape also play a major role in the paintings of Swedish artist Malin Persson (b. 1978, Gränna). Especially in memories of the dark Swedish forest landscape from her native region with its hidden paths and mysterious mood. And not to forget the Dutch landscape. A landscape of lines, of sky and water and the inevitable horizon. A landscape she experiences as ‘open’. After all, Persson has been living and working in Amsterdam for more than two decades. Persson has a romantic view of ‘the purity of nature’. But her search as an artist for the possibilities of abstraction led her to experiment with hard geometric forms. In a poetic interplay of figuration (the landscape) with geometric structures, lozenge shapes and grids, she convincingly demonstrates that naturalistic representation and abstraction need not be mutually exclusive. Between abstraction and figuration The landscape, in Persson’s work, is also an inner landscape. The landscape as a memory, in which the parts each tell their own story, and take on their own meaning. “My work expresses inner images and transformed images.” |
