How many meters are there until heaven?
Solo Exhibition
Galleri Mejan, The Royal Institute of Art
Stockholm 2010
MELLANRUM
The Stripes Deepen in Parallel
When I look at Elisabeth Frieberg’s two paintings How many meters are there until heaven? (2010) I think of Jan Håfström’s painterly object, Berättelsen om ett berg [The Narrative of a Mountain] from 1985. Both are a kind of contemplation of mountain surfaces. Or levels of the atmosphere. The works also have the stripes in common – the description of an experience by the means of an even division of the image. The painting as a regularly recurring surface. Jan Håfström’s red and white stripes are laid out alternately on the wooden panel. His object is divided in the middle by a depression or an elevation, depending on how you choose to look at it. Elisabeth Frieberg has elected to divide her work in two separate paintings. Which, in parallel, are one and the same.
One painting shows eight narrow, perpendicular surfaces that activate one another through the contrast between warm and cold colour tones. The surfaces vibrate by a light that emanates from the darkly coloured ground. As particles of air. The same yellow, red, green, blue and brown hues recur as extremely narrow stripes in the other painting. The coloured lines appear in layers, making the pictorial plane bulge outwards and inwards. The gaps between the stripes allow the dramatically composed sub-painting to emerge so that two images are displayed at the same time. The painting’s halftone lines make one’s gaze wander between surface and depth. Without being fixed into one position.
Elisabeth Frieberg measures the space at Galleri Mejan in a similar way. By the placement of the two paintings How many meters are there until heaven?, she lets the distance point to the relationship between them. Which image is nearest heaven? Which one belongs to the earth? The paintings’ reciprocal perspectives are dissolved by the spatial division. And by the painterly depiction. Maybe they describe the same thing? As close-ups of each other.
Magnus Bons
English translation: Hans Olsson
How many meters are there until heaven? Solo Exhibition, Galleri Mejan, The Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm 2010. Photo Carl Henrik Tillberg.
How many meters are there until heaven? No 2. 344×200 cm. Oil on canvas. 2010. Photo Carl Henrik Tillberg.
Detail. How many meters are there until heaven? No 2.
How many meters are there until heaven? No 1. 200×344 cm. Oil on canvas. 2010. Photo Carl Henrik Tillberg.
Detail. How many meters are there until heaven? No 1.
How many meters are there until heaven? Solo Exhibition, Galleri Mejan, The Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm 2010. Photo Carl Henrik Tillberg.