Malmö Studio Visits. 5 September 2023

Malmö studio visits on the 5th of September 2023 with: Rina Eine Løvaasen and Marianne Andersson Embäck, Pia Hansson and Finn Anton Örstrand, Maria E. Harryson and Linnea Carlsson, Desirée Burenstrand-Schyman and Johan Sandström

On the way back to Stockholm from Juxtapose Art Fair, Flat Octopus stopped by Malmö for a full day of artists’ studio visits. Alice Máselníková and our guest artist Bengt Jahnsson-Wennberg visited eight fantastic artists in the various Malmö studio collectives to get to know more about what’s cooking in the art pot here (and above all as a research stage for our future exciting idea to connect on a more sustainable basis the art scenes in Stockholm and Malmö – exciting times!

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Part 1/4: Rina Eine Løvaasen and Marianne Andersson Embäck

Rina Eide Løvaasen’s oil paintings range from gigantic to small canvases, which together with immersive sound/video and glass and limestone sculptures emit a cosmological sort of beauty where nature intertwines with symbols and diagrams. We visited her in her studio at Äspogatan 1, an impressive industrial building with a generous enough size to host Løvaasen’s daring formats. The artist graduated from Malmö Art Academy with an MFA in 2015 and was awarded the Ellen Trotzig fund from Malmö Art Museum and Malmö Stad in 2016.

Marianne Andersson Embäck has her studio in Ateljéföreningen Addo on Borrgatan 4 among dozens of other artists. Her paintings have a playful yet sensitive and introspective feeling inspired by the intimacy of daily objects and cartoon. She explores a variety of small formats which have a genuine feeling of painterly joy and can be displayed in a range of compositions. We also got to see some of Marianne’s beautiful artists’ books. Andersson Embäck graduated from Malmö Konstskola Forum in 1987 and her work is in a number of public collections.

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Part 2/4: Pia Hansson and Finn Anton Örstrand

Still in Ateljéföreningen Addo we visited the Swedish artist Pia Hansson. Her delicate both large and smaller-scale pencil drawings on drafting film overlap each other, as well as photographic material, in a play of transparency and luminosity. The bodies of animals, toys and objects fit together unexpectedly with a detail for the bizarre and somewhat uncomfortable. Hansson recently exhibited at Landskrona konsthall and Sjöbo konsthall.

Energised by a little lunch we made our way to another part of the city to see Finn Anton Örstrand‘s studio in Ateljéföreningen Sulfur @sulfurateljeforening at Industrigatan 20J. Here one can roam several floors of artists’ studios (we have to come back). Öhrstrand works in a sunlit corner room so bright he actually covered one of the windows (talk of light-luxury!). Öhrstrand has explored a range of expressions in the past and has been producing a series of soothing and translucent paintings in the past years. We were shown the most recent works that depict interiors and daily encounters. Using oil, raw pigment and watercolour on linen, one gets that feeling of lightness and rawness from Örstrand’s paintings, whilst at the same time they are intimate and relatable. Örstrand graduated from Konstfack and is also behind the initiative Casinot XXH.

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Part 3: Maria E. Harryson and Linnea Carlsson

Still in Ateljéöreningen Sulfur at Industrigatan 20J we continued our visit with the Swedish artist Maria E. Harryson. Harryson’s next exhibition opens this month at S:t Johannes kyrka in Malmö, and one can immediately feel that her spiritual and dreamlike drawings mixed with watercolour will match such an environment fantastically. Both in her drawing and sculpture occur themes of re-connection with nature, symbolism and a certain melancholy. Harryson graduated from Konstfack and exhibited both nationally and internationally.

Linnea Carlsson welcomed us to her studio at the same street, in Bunker Studio Collective located in a literal bunker. Carlsson showed her work with us previously in the Painters’ salon 2022 at @molekylgallery and we have followed her work since. Inspired by classical renaissance painting and making references to symbols, and mythical and spiritual figures (such as that of the Prophet), Carlsson works predominantly with painting (oil on wood) and sculpture. Her small intricately detailed paintings capture minute stillness quite unusual in contemporary painting while not becoming stiff.

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Part 4: Desirée Burenstrand-Schyman and Johan Sandström

We visited Desirée Burenstrand-Schyman at her studio at Ateljéföreningen Sulfur where she recently moved from Äspogatan. Burenstrand-Schyman paints in an airy, performative way with bold brushstrokes that give at the same time the feeling of an intimate, but distanced space. She explores the different ways of presenting painting to create a more interactive, illusory perception installing them on bent metal and wood frames. Burenstrand-Schymanholds an MFA from Umeå Academy of Art from 2022.

Johan Sandström showed us his workspace divided between a studio in his jungle-like garden and his house. Sandström works with painting and sculpture, with a main theme of the ongoing struggle between the rational and the chaotic and unconscious, as well as our search for and failure to understand our own existence and place in nature. He works on numerous paintings in parallel, exploring two different directions in his painting, one expressive and experimental and the other more in line with his architectural background. He is the founder of Molekyl gallery and the collaborative project Rymdprogrammet and holds MFA in Fine Art from Konstfack.