Andreas Eriksson: Erosion

Andreas Eriksson was awarded the Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel 2007. The jury made the following comments in their report on the Swedish artist’s installation: “Andreas Eriksson works with a variety of materials. Here in Basel he does painting, photography and sculpture, for which he uses structures from nature. His still works have their origins in the isolation of his homeland, a small place in the Swedish countryside. In accordance with the famous quote from Cézanne, he does not work subject to nature, but in parallel to it, such as when he traces the painterly structures and rhythms of a group of tree trunks…”.

Living in self-imposed isolation (without disregarding contemporary artistic discourse) and intensively observing nature at all times of the day and during every season are still central keys to understanding his work process. Eriksson says: “My work is always based on exploring my reactions to my perceptions and experience of the “external” world, particularly my feelings and emotions towards nature and my projections into it”. This self-reflective approach also implies Eriksson’s distance from the 19th century Romantic tradition in Nordic landscape painting.

Eriksson uses a variety of media to “reconstruct” perceptions of the external world in his studio ─ watercolor and painting, plastic and relief, photography and graphic prints, and even woven wall hangings, which have been out of fashion since postwar times.

Eriksson describes the internal cohesion between these different artistic methods of expression as follows: “I try out various environments in my studio and see how they work. The connections that I find may be at a formal or emotional level. Sometimes they are structural correspondences ─ in the sense that there are parallels or symmetries between the trees in the photographs and the lines in my pictures. There may also be similarities in material surface qualities, or there are similar associations and atmospheres. (…) Every picture is an abstraction in the end, whether it is a photograph or a painting. And on the other hand there is obviously this tendency in abstract art of continually discovering figurative readings.”

Andreas Eriksson was born in Björsäter, Sweden in 1975. He studied at the Royal University College of Fine Arts in Stockholm from 1993 to 1998. He lives in Medelplana, Sweden.