MARIE-LOUISE EKMAN AND TWO MASTERPIECES FROM 1976
7 June - 26 June 2019

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On the 4th of June 1937, Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) laid down his paint brushes after 35 days of uninterrupted work on one, gigantic painting. The result was “Guernica”, an artistic, and today iconic, monument to the horrendous bombing by Franco’s forces of the Spanish town. The only person who was allowed to observe the artist during this work was the lover he had met the year before; the avant-garde photographer Dora Maar (1907-1997), who also documented the birth of “Guernica” in a series of photographs. From this painting, Picasso developed other works, figures in “Guernica” were given life in other paintings. Later that same year, in October, Picasso painted “Femme en pleur”, the final and most powerful of a series of paintings depicting the crying woman. On the one hand, the crying woman was a symbol of all the women and mothers who had lost children and loved ones in the Spanish civil war, all the innocent people who had been thrust into the horrors of war, but in Picasso’s eyes it was as much a portrait of Dora Maar. She became his own symbol of the crying woman. Picasso’s ‘”Femme en pleur” (1937) is now part of the collections at the Tate in London.

Marie-Louise Ekman (born 1944) in the mid-70s paints what will become some of her most famous works. At this point she has, since her first exhibition in 1967, already created a world and a language for the artistic expression that has become her unmistakable hallmark. With simple forms and the almost comic book-like structure of her paintings in stark colours, and with a focus on the absurdities of everyday life, her paintings stood for something especially peculiar. With a sense of humour and an equal dose of seriousness, Marie-Louise Ekman created paintings that told about Life; about all the hardship, all the happiness, all the sadness, all the fun, and everything else on the sliding scale in between. The satire undermined hierarchical structures and shabby gender roles, and the seriousness showed up injustices and the importance of sexual liberation, and all this against a background of Pop Art aesthetics, playing with the depiction of the modernistic image of the male genius.

‘A Picasso-woman and a couple’ (1976) is one of Marie-Louise Ekman’s most famous works. This wonderful and highly intelligent painting is a distillation of Ekman’s sense of humour. The Americanisation of Pop Art is embodied by the comic-book character Daisy Duck who, with a closed and smirking beak, meets the angry man’s erect penis. Time has run out for the angry old man, the new generation of Daisys close their beaks. This scene takes place in front of Picasso’s “Femme en pleur” who, perhaps at last, witnesses a power structure in flux.