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Thursday, February 02, 2006
Focus: Cecilia Edfalk “Double White Venus”
Art Institute of Chicago: February 2–April 23
Cecilia Edefalk (b. Sweden, 1954) is a painter of deeply concentrated, expressively oblique images. The artist exhibits comparatively few paintings; they always center on a single motif and are executed and presented in series. Past subjects form an eccentric group, including the comedy duo Laurel and Hardy, self-portraits, a copulating couple, and a classical marble head. Although she is a brilliant colorist, her palette is tightly restricted. In one way or another, all of her work emerges from a relationship to other modes of representation, most often photography. Her paintings have been almost exclusively figurative, although some of her latest, more experimental paintings verge on total abstraction. Most recently, the artist has reconsidered her own painted works as exquisite photographic details. In every respect, her project is a conceptual one; Edefalk is engaged in a quiet, forceful investigation into the mechanics of making and looking at the painted image. ...