ISSUES

In Core, Lydia Ericsson Wärn’s second solo exhibition with ISSUES, the artist continues her pursuit of the elastic subject through repetition. Ericsson Wärn is clearly magnetized around certain ideas that recur across her compositions, allowing her to privilege formalism over content. Within this framework, painting itself is the narrative. At the core of her practice, however, is a desire to explore her own temperament up close through the creative act. By pushing pigments and enacting particular gestures, she establishes a syntax of textures and brushwork. Each image communicates what it needs to its producer, and she follows the proposed logics.

A woman’s body is the recurring element in Ericsson Wärn’s work, the artist becoming a constant subject by way of mere availability. Like scaffolding for the painterly project, her form is reproduced over and over while she deploys different arrangements of color. Ericsson Wärn’s supine figure is regularly adrift in a swell of paint, sans any traceable reference to a locale. This loss of context also points to the possibilities of disappearance and fatality, with the body suspended in a nonspace akin to purgatory. For this reason, works such as Gray petite performer and Pinkie also relate back to deathbed images from history–like those of Ferdinand Hodler–through which the viewer reckons with his or her own mortality.

Inflections of Shakespeare's tragic Ophelia are no accident. Ericsson Wärn is well aware of the precedents here, from John Everett Millais's Pre-Raphaelite interpretation, to Odilon Redon’s Symbolist rendering. In the current exhibition, a reference is made available by way of title, though in Ericsson Wärn’s Ophelia, the panel bears no signs of the figure. Instead, she renders an unpeopled riverbend framed by a fallen tree. This paraphrase is relatively distant from its origin, though the artist threads implicit connections and questions like: Has Ophelia drowned? Was she ever even here?

Three sympathetic paintings refer directly to a ruffle. The aspect is first stationed on a minimally rendered blouse worn by a figure whose face bears an assortment of red pigments. Here, one can trace allusions to Fragonard, while the nonfigurative space is congruent with Guston’s reduced AbEx compositions. In the next iteration, it is extracted from the textile context and set within a compilation of gray tones. Its final manifestation in turquoise looks more akin to a satellite image of a river than it does a furbelow. These paintings are self-evident, their previous iterations coming through in the abstract passages. revealing their history of layers.

Both Yellow petite performer and Redpinkyellowgray are forays into the exaggerated landscape format in similar palettes, though markedly different scales. The former, for instance, is a modest abstraction that contends with the suggestion of a subject. Based on its title, one is compelled to seek out certain cues that might allude to something anatomical. As such, the painting is constantly made and unmade during sustained examination. The larger counterpart largely avoids these same concerns, contrasting an alleged human subject with abstract space.

What remains consistent across these canvases is Ericsson Wärn’s exceptional ability to architect space. She consistently opts for a shallower depth of field, but seeks perspectival variability. There is also a lot of information embedded within the material, with many areas that have been visibly reworked. All of these painterly acrobatics result in unclear orientations and confounded relational nodes. Core lays bare Ericsson Wärn’s latent compositional desires and her continued ability to build upon her discrete conventions.

-Reilly Davidson

Curator and writer based in New York City

Lydia Ericsson Wärn b. 1994 Stockholm, Sweden. Lives and works in Stockholm. Lydia graduated from HfBK Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main in. Solo shows include Center, Meredith Rosen Gallery, New York City, USA (2024); Predella, Neue Alte Brücke, Frankfurt am Main (2023); Of the One in the Many, ISSUES, Stockholm (2022); Phantasmatic Graft, Kunst- und Kulturstiftung Opelvillen, Rüsselsheim, Germany (2021); Faithful Recreations, James Sturkey, Joanne, Frankfurt am Main, Germany (2018) and After Before, Mossutställningar, Stockholm (2018). Group exhibitions include Interior Alphabet, OTP Copenhagen (2024); Downtown Issues II, ISSUES, Stockholm (2023); End of History?, Gallery Nordenhake, Stockholm (2022); Future Watch, Kulturhuset, Stockholm (2021); Smith and Janey, curated by Coyote, Arcway and Bonamatic, Copenhagen, Denmark (2020); Side by Side, Fffriedrich, Frankfurt am Main (2020) and L’origine du Monde, Stene Projects Lounge, Stockholm (2018).