Agneta Ekholm

Integrating the aesthetic qualities of both minimalism and hard-edge painting, expressed with a gentle countenance, her visual language sits comfortably within the global history of abstract painting. Infused with an awareness of the trace — the physical act of painting — as well as the emotional charge embedded within it, her elegant compositions act as veils through which profound contemplation can be encountered.

Balancing refined simplicity with an emotional charge Ekholm’s serene paintings elicit moments of contemplation that resonates deeply with viewers. The organic flow of her forms and the meditative quality of her surfaces transcend the boundaries of abstraction, offering an experience that is both visually captivating and profoundly calming.

With a career spanning more than three decades, Ekholm’s work has been celebrated in over 30 solo exhibitions and is held in prestigious international and Australian collections. Her art continues to inspire, offering serene spaces for reflection and connection.

"With a painting process refined over nearly three decades, I build countless translucent and semi-translucent layers, with moments of solid depth through controlled surrender, allowing chance and precision to coexist as images emerge slowly.
Building, dissolving, and rubbing back the surface until a final image appears, each gesture becomes a kind of trace - of breath, of time, of inner terrain."
Agneta Ekholm - Artist Statement

'Like all strong creators Agneta Ekholm has with maturity sharpened a “signature style”. This is the technical term for what we often savour in talented creators; like the way a novelist chooses and sets out words, or an accomplished soloist plays the music or an artist applies paint using their own “voice” , an essentially personal idiom, which cannot be copied. She applies the paint with a fluent ease using brushes and sponges, and has such a practised hand when working that she never resorts to masking tape to get those crisp edges. It’s a matter of s sureness, I sort of visceral control of the paint, which is why no one else can do these things... Confidently working to International standards, making subtle compositions which throb with historical awareness yet are also so uniquely her own. Rising above provincial matters, the artist is unmistakably part of an international movement within abstract painting today'
Excerpt from catalogue essay by Christopher Heathcote 2017

'Agneta Ekholm’s large canvases with their subtle, dissolving semi-transparent veils of colour, even on first encounter, are striking and unforgettable. They are deeply immersive paintings – refined, exquisite and restrained – works that operate on a non-verbal, contemplative level, more like painted music than a painted narrative.'
Excerpt from catalogue essay by Sasha Grishin 2023

THE CANBERRA TIMES — Monday September 12, 2022, page
20 — ARTS — canberratimes.com.au

In slow art refined elegance prevails
Excerpts from Review by Sasha Grishin

'Her large acrylic paintings have a refined elegance where all the elements of design have been carefully distilled within an organic flow of non-figurative forms.
The artist who most strongly reminds me of Ekholm's paintings is the American painter and printmaker Helen Frankenthaler and the style what is sometimes referred to as Post-Painterly Abstraction.

A parallel may be drawn with Frankenthaler's works, especially from the 1960s, that were painstakingly and laboriously created but which on first encounter deceptively appear as spontaneous marks on the canvas or what she called "one really beautiful wrist motion that is synchronized with your head and heart".

Ekholm works in acrylics in a very deliberate and meticulous manner.

There is a constant process of layering and erasure where acrylic paint is apparently attacked with a sponge and thin layers of pigment leave a film of colour on the canvas, almost like echoes and ghostly traces.

This is worked over for a period of time - sometimes over weeks or months - until the flows and ebbs of washes find their own resolution.

The painting is defiantly non-figurative, although some viewers will inevitably read it in terms of a landscape, or a skyscape or a particular time of day, when light is fading but the darkness has not quite come to dominate the world.

Frankenthaler once famously said, "You have to know how to use the accident, how to recognise it, how to control it, and ways to eliminate it so that the whole surface looks felt and born all at once."

Ekholm appears to believe in this advice, after decades of practice she has devised a method of work where she surrenders to chance and employs it as a creative tool through which to create her paintings where the final result appears light and as if breathed effortlessly onto the canvas.

There is a stillness and a confined internal dynamism.

... there is a peaceful tranquillity that triumphs in the final resolution.

Ekholm's exhibition is an example of "slow art" where elegance prevails and there is nothing to distract the eye from the quiet and focussed meditative power of these paintings.''