Karin Broos

Wonderful women by the water – like the title of Monika Fagerholm’s prize-winning novel – is how in a single sentence one could concisely describe Karin Broos’ painterly depictions.
The painting ‘Den Gula Strömmen’ forms, along with works such as ‘Spegling’, ‘Mörk Spegling’ as well as ‘Rosa Spegling’, ‘Väktare’ and ‘Flytande’, the backbone of Karin Broos’ artistic practice. These works all have the motif of a young woman lying down, sitting, floating or standing in glimmering lake water. It is precisely water, and its mirror-like surface, that is so central to Broos’ practice: water as that seductive essential element, yet also as a powerful current of depth and darkness. In ‘Den Gula Strömmen’ a moment is evoked where human and the elemental have united, a weightless existence without beginning or end. There is nothing in the painting that restricts this vision, no horizon or shoreline in sight. It is easy to make the connection to motherhood, the small child inside the womb, while at the same time Broos depicts a moment of pure joie de vivre. A few seconds of total relaxation before the children on the beach once again demand one’s attention.

The models in the paintings are usually taken from her close family: her daughters and grandchildren. The seemingly everyday situations are often ambiguous, charged with an undertone of thoughtfulness. Broos mostly finds inspiration for her depictions of nature from her home environment of Värmland; the lake Fryken, the enormous forests that surrounds the lake’s beaches, or from her home in Östra Ämtervik.

Broos employs her own photographs as inspiration and aide-memoires in what is a laborious artistic working process. It is a world inhabited by women that Broos depicts: women, but also children and dogs frozen in time. Their faces are repeatedly turned away, their task is not to meet the viewer’s gaze and their bodies are not reproduced in order to please an art audience. Broos’ models get to be themselves. Lost in thought, they seem relaxed and self-confident. The artist’s intimate relationship with the models undoubtedly plays a large part in this.

‘Speglingar’ is the title of Ingela Lind and Hasse Persson’s book from 2011 about Karin Broos’ practice. In an interview with Hasse Persson Broos tells him that she could paint reflections on water for the rest of her life. That is how important and captivating water and its mirror-like surface is to her.

Karin Broos had a somewhat late career breakthrough with an exhibition at Kristinehamns Konstmuseum in 2008, which was then followed by exhibitions at, amongst others, Borås Konstmuseum, Christian Larsen Gallery as well as Sven Harrys konstmuseum and Waldemarsudde in Stockholm. A major retrospective exhibition of her work has also toured the USA.