CONTEMPORARY ART STOCKROOM Agneta Ekholm

Serene, vast and immersive, Agneta Ekholm’s sensitively layered paintings evoke a myriad of emotional and cognitive responses. Her organic compositions suggest movement, the play of light, glass-like formations or the flow of water. The fluid ebb and flow of her paint intuitively renders graceful forms mastered over the thirty years of her practice. Trained within the Finnish art school system, which promotes a holistic view of the artist's craft, her studies included learning skills such as stretcher building and paint production. As a result, the physical materiality of her practice is as crucial to her as the final outcome. Incorporating the aesthetic qualities of both minimalism and hard edge painting, expressed through a gentle countenance, her visual language sits comfortably within the global history of abstract painting. Pulsing with an awareness of the trace, of the physical act of painting, as well as the emotional charge that can be embedded within that action, her elegant compositions function as veils through which an experience of deep contemplation can be encountered.

In a way nature is always the starting point. It acts as a mirror on the soul; a reflex. In nature I find something that triggers a kind of personal state of mind. Working with fast-drying acrylic and water, I use a sponge to apply layer upon layer of shapes and gestures with solid pigment and transparent washes, while continually washing and rubbing sections away until the final complex image is built. I may work for days on a small isolated section of the painting. It is an obsessive and fastidious process and the work travels a complex journey of twists and turns before I have found the ‘solution’ which is that painting's final incarnation.
Agneta Ekholm

Childhood memories of snow and wintry ice does fuel Ekholm’s work, although mixed in with this are the sand dunes and surf waves near her current home, as well as the adjacent wetlands and river estuary she often roams. From these modest personal experiences, these moments of inward joy communing with the world as it pulses, the artist extracts her evocative visual forms. They carry the suggestion of ebbing liquids, melting snows, sliding sands, interiors of sea shells, that is, of everyday things in nature that unceasingly flow and change and move.
Excerpt from essay by Dr Christopher Heathcote, 2019

Primed with subdued emotion, Ekholm’s works are built intuitively from deep imaginings as well as a formalist engagement with a technical process honed over more than two decades. Each painting evolves organically on the canvas, the very first mark like a seed dropped from the artist’s mind. Working with fast-drying acrylic and water, Ekholm uses a sponge to meticulously apply layers of solid pigment and transparent washes to create moments that are ephemeral yet resolute. She rubs sections away in a reductive process that leaves shadows, echoes, memories. These spectral presences haunt the canvas in undulating veils and cascading contours, their elegant opacity suggesting the existence of some deep cognitive space. Beneath the translucent ivory veils, in the swirling pools and inky voids, there is the promise of insight through contemplation.
Excerpt from essay by Elli Walsh, 2022

Finnish-born, Victorian-based artist Agneta Ekholm has been a finalist in the Muswellbrook Art Prize (2020), Ravenswood Art Prize (2020, 2018), the Wilson Visual Art Award (2013), the Fleurieu Art Prize (2013), the Mount Eyre Art Prize (2012), the Fisher’s Ghost Art Award (2012) and the Redland Art Award (2012) as well as being a six time finalist in the Calleen Art Award (2010-2016). In 2017 Agneta won the Best Artist Award at Denfair. She has completed major commissions for the Novotel, Melbourne, the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Guangzhou, China, the Marriott Hotel, Beijing, and The Parisian Sands, Macau, China. Her works are held in major public and private collections nationally and internationally, including Ritz Carlton Yacht Collection, Artbank, the Embassy of Finland (Australia), Sony Music Corporation, Google (USA), JW Marriott Hotel, Miami, Florida, Marriott Dallas Market Center, USA, Mandarin Oriental, Guangzhou, Marriott Hotel, Beijing and Rydges Hotel Group.

On 2020 Agneta Ekholm completed an impressive 6 metre-long commission for the Ritz Carlton Yacht Collection. This piece is now traveling the world on the Ritz Carlton's exclusive luxury accommodation.