Ann Edholm
The Green of the Distant Meadow

A painter through and through, Ann Edholm has developed her own geometric lexicon of bold and seemingly simple shapes and spatial relationships over the last thirty years. Many references in her paintings derive from artworks of cultural and historical importance such as Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, Barnett Newman’s “zip” paintings, or Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece.

The exhibition is closely linked to Edholm’s 2015 Berlin exhibition “Trotz (In Spite of All)” and extends her pictorial search for expressing the unimaginable, the unspeakable, and the sacred. Since then, she has been engaging with Georges Didi-Huberman’s book Images in Spite of All and the four rare photographs taken by a prisoner inside Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944 from the threshold to the camp out toward the slender birches and the sky. These photographs have been the subject of some controversy in relation to iconoclasm, especially regarding the memorial culture surrounding the Holocaust. Didi-Huberman refutes the generally accepted axiom that the Holocaust and the suffering and crimes in the concentration and extermination camps are unimaginable and hence unrepresentable. He writes: “Like the signs of language, images in their own way—and this is the problem—are able to produce an effect along with its negation. They are, in turn, fetish and fact, vehicle of beauty and site of the unbearable, consolation and the inconsolable. They are neither pure illusion nor all of the truth, but a dialectic stirring together the veil with its rip.”

This dialectical oscillation between veils and rips can also be found in Ann Edholm’s recent work. Titles such as Night and Night III, Ash, Dawn, or Voices and the sheer physicality and presence of the abstract paintings make it impossible for the viewer to withdraw from the image. Edholm’s paintings offer an encounter on a human scale. Her mastery in the application of her reduced color palette, and the sharp, penetrating wedges protruding from the bottom or sides into a cloudy, gesturally painted background open up a space of their own in the image. The paintings provide room for memories that by their very nature defy language, compel silence, and shatter meaning and significance.