En man som lagar mat (En hund som äter) [A man cooking (A dog eating)]

Signed and dated ‘M.L. De Geer 1970’.

Also titled and signed (verso) ‘En man som lagar mat. Marie-Louise De Geer Bergenstråhle. Skepparg. 4. Sth’.

Marie-Louise Ekman has alternated, effortlessly, between painting, sculpture, film and drama since the late 1960s. In her works, Ekman exposes the absurdity of everyday life whilst undermining social constructions in the process. In bourgeois rooms, decorated with floral wallpaper, people and animals sit at the same table in surreal scenes where the underdog sometimes has the upper hand.

Ekman belongs to a generation of Swedish artists who emerged in the politically turbulent 1960s. Many young artists of the time were deeply influenced by popular culture, and comic books in particular. Ekman made series of silkscreen prints, stitched fishcakes out of shiny, pink silk, built enclosed worlds out of miniature objects, and borrowed the format of comic strips for her own serialised paintings. In her early works, she also appropriated images from The Phantom, Donald Duck and Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy.

Ekman’s works have a strong narrative focus. In cramped pictorial spaces with warped one-point perspectives, dreams, passions and disappointments run amok in a heightened reality. One famous example can be found in the series At Home With a Lady from 1973, where a lonely woman acts out her desires, captive in an interior, like an animal in the zoo, reliving the same reality day after day. This kind of serialised pictorial storytelling had already been put to the test, a couple of years earlier, in one of Ekman’s masterpieces Livet och döden (Life and Death) (1971, oil on canvas, 124 x 137 cm, private collection), one of the focal points when it was shown for the first time at Svensk-Franska konstgalleriet, Stockholm in Ekman’s solo exhibition entitled Till min älskade [To my beloved] (an exhibition which, possibly, also included En man som lagar mat [En hund som äter]). The comic strip format, telling the absurd story of a man -and his Siamese twin- who meets a dog -that has grown together with a monkey-, was (for the first time in Ekman’s production) told in a comic strip fashion (through the use of compartmentalised bubbles in which the story unravels).

The dog is a constant companion in Ekman’s unique and quirky artistic storytelling. It appears in early works such as En hund i sitt hem / A Dog at Home (1970, gouache on silk, 39 x 28 cm, a painting which, incidentally, was originally presented in the same kind of dark wooden frame as the one on En man som lagar mat [En hund som äter]. The dog reappeared as recently as 2024 in Ekman’s site-specific decoration of Bar Zeppelin in Stockholm, where a dog is glimpsed, disgracefully pooping in the street, in one of the large murals.

En man som lagar mat (En hund som äter) is a classic work by Ekman characterised byher absurd sense of humour and meticulous craftsmanship. The style is close to illustration, and painterly effects such as brushstrokes and atmospheric perspectives are absent. Instead, there is an ‘Ekmanesque’ naivety mixed with influences from pop art and childrens book illustrations - a humorous language that has been referred to as ‘Swedish pop realism’ or ‘pop naivism’.

Provenance

Private collection (acquired directly from the artist in the 1970’s).

Bukowskis, Stockholm, Sale 576, Höstens Contemporary, 14 November 2013, lot 440.

Uppsala Auktionskammare, Stockholm, Internationell kvalitetsauktion, 10 - 13 December 2019, lot 617.

Private collection (acquired at the above sale).

Bukowskis, Stockholm, Sale 658, Contemporary Art & Design, 22 – 23 October 2024, lot 294.

Firestorm Foundation (acquired at the above sale).

Exhibitions

(Possibly) Svensk-Franska Konstgalleriet, Stockholm, Till min älskade, 1971.

Literature

(Ed.) Maria Lind, Marie-Louise Ekman, 1998, illustrated p. 30.

Copyright Firestorm Foundation