First Solo Exhibition of Contemporary Swedish Artist Cecilia Edefalk to Be Presented by the Art Institute

January 23, 2006

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Erin Hogan
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The Art Institute of Chicago presents the first solo U.S. exhibition of Swedish artist Cecilia Edefalk as part of its Focus exhibitions of contemporary art. Double White Venus, a series of 12 paintings all titled Double White Venus, will be on view in Gallery 139 of the museum from February 2 to April 23, 2006. Born in 1954, Edefalk draws viewers in by exploring, through repetition as well as innovative installations, the mechanics of making and looking at painted images. Edefalk works slowly and deliberately, in direct contrast to our high-speed, image-based world; she began Double White Venus in 1999 and completed its 12 paintings over the course of nearly 7 years.

The series was born from a black-and-white snapshot of a fragmented, classical sculpture of Venus in a garden. Edefalk continually revisited this image, recording the revisions her memory and her practice made of it here in these muted gray, blue, and white paintings. Venus is the fundamental element of each, but this figure emerges and recedes, dissolves and reappears, across the paintings. In the process, Venus’s ghostly presence calls attention to the permeable boundaries among original, replica, and copy. And as Venus and her setting undergo these transformations, the paintings’ relationships to one another change as well.  Repetition is a critical concept for Edefalk; she explains, “Repetition is a way to underline the uniqueness of painting. . . . Within a given group of works, each work is repeated in an individual way. Repetition is a tool to express different ideas.”

Edefalk repeats primary motifs not only in her paintings, like Venus in Double White Venus, but also in her installation strategies, a critical component of her work. Here, Venus is re-presented not only in the paintings but also by an enlarged projection of one the smaller paintings; the projection itself includes an original painting as an element of its composition. Such doubling demonstrates Edefalk’s control of scale via different media and suggests the myriad ways in which images are constantly refashioned. But the projection also, somewhat ironically, enhances our understanding of the original. As curator James Rondeau notes, “The projected surrogate possesses greater drama and clarity than the small original source, and, curiously, it can reveal more about the nature of the object itself--the tooth and weave of the canvas, the texture of the brushstroke. A counterintuitive truth emerges: the duplicate commands more authority, more authenticity than the original.”

Because Edefalk exhibits comparatively few paintings, this presentation is a rare opportunity to see her deeply concentrated and expressively oblique images. Her Venus joins a small group of subjects that have included Laurel and Hardy, self-portraits, a couple in flagrante delicto, and a classical marble head. And while these and previous works have been widely exhibited internationally--including at Documenta 11 (2002), the Moderna Museet in Stockholm (1999), the Kunsthalle Bern (1999), the Museé d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1998), the Whitney Museum of American Art (1997), the São Paulo Biennial (1994), and the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin (1992)--Double White Venus is her first solo exhibition in the United States.

In this era of streaming images and innumerable visual landscapes, Edefalk’s constant engagement with the act of representation itself could not be more timely--or trenchant. Her quiet and meditative works are a necessary antidote to our feverishly visual environment.

Curator James Rondeau will be leading a free gallery talk on the exhibition on February 17, 2006, from 12:00 to 12:45 p.m.

Focus: Cecilia Edefalk: Double White Venus is organized by the Art Institute of Chicago with major support from Mickey Cartin. Additional funding is provided by IASPIS: International Artists’ Studio Program in Sweden; the Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation; Swedish Council of America; the American-Scandinavian Foundation; Embassy of Sweden, Washington, DC; Consulate General of Sweden in Chicago; and the Swedish American Museum Center, Chicago. Ongoing support for Focus exhibitions is provided by the Alfred L. McDougal and Nancy Lauter McDougal Fund for Contemporary Art. Focus: Cecilia Edefalk: Double White Venus is curated by James Rondeau, the Francis and Thomas Dittmer Curator of Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago.