Masterfully attentive Cecilia Edefalk at the Waldemarsudde museum – Sveriges Radio

Listen!

Actually, this review does not need to be much longer than that. For it is precisely such a general attention turns out to be the red thread of Cecilia edefalk’s art, here.

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Tag maskrosorna, which gave name to the exhibition at Waldemarsudde. I find it hard to imagine a clearer symbol of life’s volatility, and for that matter the resurrection, than the utblommade dandelions Edefalk placed in small vases around the castle.

It is something of a masterpiece to deal with such a “finished” symbol, but that it strikes out the art, and turns into cliché. Edefalk succeed, not by, as many others had done – work of symbolism. But rather next to, or around it.

So this: the way an armful dandelions in a vase, in the middle of a room. Place a large, black-and-white photograph of a meadow full with the small dunbollarna on the wall next to the; photographed, as the title indicates, in “the sun’s last rays”. Diagonally opposite it: a small bouquet of them painted in red, on canvas, with the title of the “Or rose”. And so on the floor, a pile of soil where the green leaves sticking up and the promise of new flowers.

In the room next to the transformed image in the photograph to three small paintings, with maskrosorna like small white puffs against a gray background.

So where circuits are she around the subject, try out different tools and in different tempi – from the photograph’s frozen moment to the actual vegetation slow, inaudible mumbling under ground.

Listen. And instead of a closed symbol opens up a symbolic space, pregnant with possibility.

And then I have only mentioned the 7 works of the exhibition, 163. Yet it is, as retrospective seen, far from complete. Several important works to be taken, and of the more coolly conceptual Cecilia Edefalk, who stood in the focus of the Moderna museet’s retrospective in 1999, you will only see the fragments of Interest.

But in return, becomes the red thread of this exhibition, follow the clearer. The listening Cecilia Edefalk thus; so open-ended open-faced with the reality that she now claims to speak with both the dead and with other forms of life.

it takes her at her, if not literally, then certainly very seriously, says something about her greatness as an artist.

And perhaps also of our need of her way to listen.

Mårten Arndtzén
marten.arndtzen@sr.se