Maria Nordin expresses herself in large-scale watercolors and animations. In her artistry, the body is a central starting point. The exhibition mainly displays works from the last five years and the deepening that has taken place. From painting bodies in their entirety, she has gone through close-ups and extreme magnifications, dissolving and reducing them to surfaces and spots, then leaving the body in its absence. An exploration of fusion and dissolution, at the same time an examination of painting as a form; of its possibility of materializing suggestions and ideas but also as a way of thinking, beyond the material.
The pink that recurs in the paintings is used as the common color for the flesh, for the body. Color also became the link into rooms and landscapes. In those paintings, the body appears to be absent, but also remains in the form of traces. The body is found in a theatrical scene, desolate and pink, in the mountain landscape that folds in the colors of the skin and the structure of the body in magnification. It is available in the skin tones of an armchair. A circular work process that wants to approach the experience of the relationship between body and place, how body and place mutually influenced each other.
Maria Nordin was born in 1980 in Linköping. She was educated at the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm. She has exhibited at Liljevalchs Konsthall, Uppsala Art Museum, Färgfabriken, Frieze Art Fair London, Galleri Magnus Karlsson and The Armory Show, New York. The artist is represented in the collections of the Gothenburg Museum of Art, the Nordic Watercolour Museum and the Danish Arts Council.
The exhibition is a collaboration between Vandalorum and the Småland Art Archive.
Photo: Maria Nordin