Annette von Malmborg — Contemporary Swedish painter in Paris, 2004 canvases
Paintings on canvas, Paris
Two thousand and four, in ten canvases.
Painted in 2004, the cycle carries the pulse of its moment: the vibrant tempo of late nineties and early two-thousands Paris and London, the fashion houses and print magazines, the club posters and cinema. Pop culture pressed into paint, held at the reserve of portraiture.
Double portrait. Two visages surface side by side from a plaster wall, twin apparitions in sienna and bone.
Annette von Malmborg
Born in Uppsala in May 1969, Annette von Malmborg descends from an old Swedish family of draughtsmen and painters that traces its name to Otto von Malmborg. She studied painting in London and Paris, and has lived and worked in Paris since 1993.
Her practice draws on Nordic restraint and French materiality in equal measure: the hush of a Hammershøi interior, the tactility of a Dubuffet wall, the iconographic weight of a Ravenna mosaic. She works slowly, in oil.
By the turn of the millennium she was a woman moving between Paris and London on the current of that era: its music, its magazines, its late nights. Her former husband, an artist manager at Warner, opened a door onto the culture of the moment, and much of what enters these canvases arrives from those years, the faces, the tempo, the glamour held just off-frame. Two children, born in the late nineties, kept her life rooted even as the city hummed around her.
The ten canvases gathered here were painted in 2004 and held privately for more than two decades. This is their first public viewing.