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Suvi Lehtinen explores space, and uses her intuition to discover the wonderful world of Amanda Karlsson for the Monday Pick.

By Rise Art | 11 Jul 2013

Suvi Lehtinen explores space, and uses her intuition to discover the wonderful world of Amanda Karlsson for the Monday Pick.

 

The children in Amanda Karlsson‘s painting Don’t be Picky seem to be facing a vast space where houses are seen floating: symbolic signifiers of home perhaps. For Karlsson the empty space is essentially the subject of the work. “I often see my motives as actors in a room, or space that I created. These actors, or objects, are not the most important part of the basic feeling that I am trying to convey. Instead, it is the space surrounding them.”

 

Amanda Karlsson_Don't be Picky1

 Amanda Karlsson, Don’t be Picky, Oil on canvas

 

Born in 1989 in Sweden, Karlsson is currently based in Berlin. She studied art at Lunnevad college and has exhibited widely in Sweden, Berlin, and most recently at the Brooklyn Art Library. Artfetch are excited to bring her onto our roster of artists, because this is work that we felt an immediate connection to. Karlsson considers her own work to be in the tradition of super realism but her paintings and drawings also have a deeply symbolic quality. The recurring appearance of houses and children, usually facing away from the viewer, stem from her unconscious, emerging onto paper or canvas intuitively.

 

Although the setting, or more particularly the houses in the paintings, are very “Swedish” Karlsson’s work isn’t directly about a deeply personal nostalgia for her homeland. The feelings they convey seem more universal and Karlsson’s stated aim is to communicate with the viewer. “My goal is to make art that requires the viewer to respond,” she says. Although the general sense one gets from the work can be melancholic, she is also a master of emotional balance as there is a good amount of dark humor involved in these works.

 

Amanda Karlsson, Accidentally Entering An Empty Canvas, 2012. Painting

Amanda Karlsson, Accidentally Entering An Empty Canvas, Oil on canvas

 

Karlsson acknowledges the work of the New Leipzig School of painters as a major influence, and this is apparent especially in her paintings, which have been her main focus until recently. In the last few years Karlsson has begun working increasing with drawings and paper collages, with themes familiar from her works on canvas. We’re looking forward to seeing more of her intriguingly intense emotional vignettes, whatever the media they come in, and to following her as she further develops her already accomplished practice.

 

See Amanda talk about her own work here.

 

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