Cecilia Edefalk

Cecilia Edefalk lives and works in Stockholm. She studied at Konstfack (University of Arts, Crafts and Design) in Stockholm from 1973 to 1977 and at Kungliga Konsthögskolan (Royal Institute of Art) in Stockholm between 1982 and 1987. Her first solo exhibition took place, in 1988, at Galleri Wallner in Malmö, Sweden and her public breakthrough came in 1990 with the legendary exhibition En annan rörelse (Another Movement) at Galleri Sten Eriksson in Stockholm. Edefalk exhibited seven paintings of different sizes, depicting the same motif (taken from an illustration for an article in the fashion magazine Klick in 1988). The original image shows a man smearing a woman’s back with suntan oil from a bottle, which he holds in his other hand. However, Edefalk chose to exclude the bottle in the series Another Movement, which gives the paintings a noticeably more ambivalent and unclear, or even unsettling, meaning.

Edefalk’s paintings are usually based on another image, or source material, often a photographic one. Her painting CU(1989, oil on canvas 192 x 96 cm, private collection) for example traces its origins back to Caspar David Friedrich’s (1774 – 1840) Frau am Fenster (1822, oil on canvas, 44 x 37 cm, Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin) with its famous, so called, “Rückenfigur” (a figure seen from behind, an artistic device commonly associated with Friedrich who, famously, made use of it in many of his pictures). The Rückenfigur serves as a compositional surrogate for the viewer to experience what they are witnessing. Friedrich depicts a lone woman who, through an open window, watches sailboats passing on the Elbe outside. In Edefalk’s work, however, spatiality and perspective have been thrown overboard. The woman is free standing within a yellow field of colour, where the ledge, or balustrade, on which she leans is indicated only by the slightest possible shift in the tonality of the palette. Another good example is Edefalk’s Dad (1987/1988, oil on canvas, 242 x 135 cm, private collection) which was inspired by Dick Bengtsson’s (1936 - 1989) legendary composition Richard in Paris(1970, oil on panel, 173 x 83 cm, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, NM6353).

Several works by Cecilia Edefalk have sold for high prices at art auctions. In 2004, the above mentioned, Dad was sold for SEK 1.21 million at Bukowskis in Stockholm. It thus became the (up until then) most expensive painting by a Swedish living artist sold at auction in Sweden. Her monumental work Baby (1986–1987, oil on canvas, 230 x 432 cm, private collection) sold for SEK 5.9 million at Bukowskis in November 2010, and the day before her oil painting Another Movement (1990) had been sold at Stockholms Auktionsverk for SEK 3.8 million.

The object of Cecilia Edefalk’s works of art is representation in painting. Hers is an investigative study in which she frequently employs a photographic image as the model for her paintings; stills, for example, from adverts and movies. Moderna Museet, Stockholm, describes Edefalk’s modus operandi as follows:

Minor but significant alterations of content, context and accentuation occur in the works, which serve not only to pose questions about painting and representation as such but also the screen through which we experience reality. Edefalk’s work can therefore also be said to explore, the actual act of, seeing itself as well as the perception of the real world. By consistently making use of “an image of an image of an image…”, she both empties the image of its original meaning and simultaneously creates a new one. When, on occasion, she partitions the image into various surfaces in an intricate fashion, our ability to comprehend is shattered like a broken mirror and we are invited to reflect on our own private natures.

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