Rita Lundqvist

"I like to be in my own world. When the work flows, when there is a kind of balance and concentration, then I feel free."

Rita Lundqvist is frugal in both format and number of works. No more than ten paintings a year, and then it's all about working every day. She always paints right up to the last minute before the exhibitions and it has happened that she has continued to paint on already sold works after the end of the exhibition.

This effort can be interpreted as an unwillingness to let go, but it can also be an awareness that the works must be absolutely balanced in order for the figures in the paintings to correctly occupy and activate their ascetic pictorial space.

It is precisely this ability to visually grasp the viewer and the space that is Rita's strength as an artist; to capture an entire space in a small format and, with precise measurements and a solitary melancholic tone, plunge the viewer into a contemplative state.

Suddenly it becomes both obvious and easy to enter into the midst of the characters and share their strange fates. In a painting that has been created through a process that is both controlled and open:

-"Nowadays I always paint for a specific exhibition and its space. I think about numbers, formats and lines and such, and then the calculator comes out. I suggest figures and the motifs gradually emerge. The events of the painting lead me on and then problems arise such as - what the hell is going on here, she's just hanging with one arm in the air? - and then suddenly you make a stool, perfect. When the paintings develop themselves in this way, I am relieved. I like it when I forget myself in the works. I have to move on, I can't question everything. [...]

Through her works, painter Rita Lundqvist sometimes appears more like a director, a creator, who arranges and allocates roles in tableaux. Clothes and props are as if taken from another time, reduced and stylised.

The uncertainty of what is going on gives the works their unique presence. Rita dominates her surfaces - she controls and allows herself to be controlled by her own world. She, who even sewed her own stylish corduroy trousers, remains true to her solitary motto: "I do it myself, it's easier that way."

Interview taken from the exhibition catalogue, "Rita Lundqvist", published by Liljevalchs for the artist's solo exhibition in Stockholm in 2010.