Olivia Reuterswärd: Lustgård/ Pleasure Garden

Overview
Olivia Reuterswärd Lustgård, 2023 Oil on canvas 150 x 115 cm
Olivia Reuterswärd
Lustgård, 2023
Oil on canvas
150 x 115 cm
Galerie Leu is pleased to present Olivia Reuterswärd’s first solo-exhibition at the gallery: Pleasure Garden. This marks the artist’s first solo-exhibition in Germany. The opening takes place on Thursday, 21 of March, 5-8 p.m. in presence of the artist.

In Olivia Reuterswärd’s pure and sensitive works, there is an ambiguity between hope and fear. The artist works intuitively, the canvas, light, and color create a relationship that intelligibly was given time to mature through different stages. The exhibition consists of eleven new meditative oil paintings in dialogue with one another, which stylistically maintain a balance between figuration and abstraction. Reuterswärd works with linseed oil and employs numerous layers to receive the result. In this thorough process of drying and adding each layer on top of the other, the artist immerses herself into the paint and its consistence.

The work Rouge is an investigation of blood and flesh, inspired by Hermann Nitsch monochrome blood paintings. In the works in the Fever series, Reuterswärd works with themes of sensuality and transparency, while technically trying to achieve fluidity. Snowdrops represents the artist experiences of nature and its color during the month March in Sweden. The grey skies, the snowdrops and the reeds along the water expressed in an impressionist mannerism. In the work Mimosa the artist explores memories of her childhood, at a young age she used to collect the intensely yellow Mimosa flowers, this memory is ruptured by an unexpected laser beam, referencing Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd’s work.

The title, Pleasure Garden, describes the artist’s mental state and physical experience while painting. Pleasure Garden, is a bittersweet place, which you can enter and exit. It is a kind of utopia, beautiful beyond words, a fairy tale place full of love and protection but simultaneously treacherous and forbidden. Reuterswärds’s paintings are deeply personal and deal with desire and otherworldliness.
 
Olivia Reuterswärd, born in 1963 in Stockholm, Sweden, holds a BFA from Beckman School of Art and Design in Stockholm and studied at Florence Academy of Art. She debuted as a painter in the early 2000s and currently works with a range of mediums, aside from painting, she also works with sculpture, performance, installation and poetry. Further, she has an extensive background as a notable illustrator with a strong focus on fashion illustration and as a textile designer. During the 1990s she was as a designer at H&M in the “White Room”. In her career a designer, Reuterswärd has collaborated with renowned institutions, such as The National Museum of Sweden, Svenskt Tenn, IKEA and Nordiska Kompaniet. She currently has her studio in the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm. Her most recent exhibitions and projects include a performance at the House of Nobility, Stockholm in 2023, a group-exhibitions at Galerie Leu, Munich, the solo-exhibition On My Honour at Galleri Glas, Stockholm in 2019, and a poetry reading at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm in 2019.

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