Marie-Louise Ekman

At the exhibition at Galerie Aronowitsch in Stockholm in 1980, Marie-Louise Ekman showed a series of remarkable paintings. Marie-Louise Ekman painted her figures and individuals placed on podiums - but always in front of different paintings by Olle Baertling.

"All works in the series have Olle Baertling's motifs as a background. So I simply placed my own figures, such as Picasso's ladies and my own children in the form of birds, on podiums in the paintings. If something is placed on a podium, it is somehow transformed into a sculpture. Like a memory of a past time."
Marie-Louise Ekman

The legendary gallerist William Aronovitsch and his gallery had a significant influence on Marie-Louise Ekman. In a sense, the gallery can be said to be a vital part of her artistic education and development.

"We had his gallery as a café after a work shift, very nice. There you could browse through his books and catalogues and I saw Baertling and the paintings in the warehouse. From the very beginning I was provoked. Non-figurative - I couldn't understand it! I started questioning William: "What do you like about this?" He explained. "It's not right what you're saying," I said.

Then he gave me a catalogue, which in those days was really nicely done. I looked at them regularly but didn't engage with them and came back. Like a riddle I couldn't figure out the answer to. Then one day I had the experience of a lifetime. One day I felt strongly that it was an image of thinking and could be an image from inside the brain. How a thought develops and how it represents something non-figurative that cannot be captured in any other way than non-figurative. It was breathtaking.

Then I wanted to see more and more and more. I got high. Like leaps of thought and movements of thought. Then it was fun to have them as a kind of space that my figures could move around in. Instead of city rooms or rooms in a house, I made a room out of his painting. I was sure to emphasise in each painting that it was Olle Baertling's painting. All paintings exist, I haven't invented any. But it's my colours that try to resemble his, but I haven't measured them. I painted them in my own way. After that I also did Mondrian and Picasso, but I only had black and white books."

The quote is taken from a conversation between Marie-Louise Ekman and Paulina Sokolow from spring 2014. The painting in the auction is one of the paintings shown at Galerie Aronowitsch's famous exhibition in 1980.

One of Marie-Louise Ekman's "Baertling paintings" from 1980, "A Dalí Monument, a Picasso Monument and an Olle Baertling Painting", is part of the Moderna Museet collection (Ref no. MOM/2017/56).