| The last two weeks of October marked the first solo exhibition in New York of internationally renowned Swedish artist and ceramic designer, Agneta Livijn. Located in SoHo’s historic Broadway Gallery, the exhibition entitled “Lily Ponds” reflects Livijn’s life experiences and travels. Having spent her childhood in both Sweden and France, Livijn was always especially attracted to the Impressionists and Post-impressionists. From Henri Matisse’s reduction of natural forms to his joyful and colorful abstractions, and the subtle applications of color and light in Claude Monet’s own water lily paintings from the end of his life at Giverny, are obvious influences. The influences of Livijn’s travels in Morocco may be less apparent. “I have always been fascinated by the life and work of Monet and Matisse,” explains Livijn, “but it is the garden design work of the French artist Jacques Majorelle that inspired the Lily Ponds paintings.” |  |
Jill Smith
The last two weeks of October marked the first solo exhibition in New York of internationally renowned Swedish artist and ceramic designer, Agneta Livijn. Located in SoHo’s historic Broadway Gallery, the exhibition entitled “Lily Ponds” reflects Livijn’s life experiences and travels. Having spent her childhood in both Sweden and France, Livijn was always especially attracted to the Impressionists and Post-impressionists. From Henri Matisse’s reduction of natural forms to his joyful and colorful abstractions, and the subtle applications of color and light in Claude Monet’s own water lily paintings from the end of his life at Giverny, are obvious influences. The influences of Livijn’s travels in Morocco may be less apparent. “I have always been fascinated by the life and work of Monet and Matisse,” explains Livijn, “but it is the garden design work of the French artist Jacques Majorelle that inspired the Lily Ponds paintings.” In fact, it was in 2006 that Livijn discovered the Jardin Marjorelle, Yves Saint Laurent’s garden in Marrakech, and from that moment onward she was compelled to pursue this elegant series of abstracted lily ponds.
Majorelle was an early 20th century French painter who settled in Marrakech in 1919, at which time he began cultivating his luxuriant and opulent, exotic garden. Comprised of thousands of exotic plants from five continents, it was an oasis of exotic plants, fountains, and structures painted in a vibrant blue that are closely associated with him. Framed in an environment of colorful Islamic architecture, the garden was purchased in 1980 by Pierre Bergé and Yves Saint Laurent who restored it to its original splendor and opened it to the public.
Taking this garden as her point of departure, Livijn was inspired by her immersion in the spirituality and graceful quietude of nature engendered by the garden. Yet, departing from Marjorelle’s Mediterranean palette of sea and sky blues, Livijn seems to take her color from a context far to the north—her native Sweden. Relying on a cool and ethereal palette of snowy textured whites, deep algae greens, wine-colored roses, and cool golds, Livijn’s quasi-abstractions shimmer and radiate from the surface, transporting the viewer to a psychological visual field akin to the cool radiance of the Northern Lights.
Her “Lily Ponds” series can be roughly divided into two closely interrelated bodies of work—the representational images of lily pads with delicately blossoming flowers floating on abstract grounds of white and gold, and the almost completely effaced abstract compositions of complex white grounds in which one can find hints of gold, greens, and dark blues. The beauty of both styles is Livijn’s abandonment to the medium specificity of the paint itself, allowing her brushstrokes to alternately scrub the surface, and drip like tears, emphasizing the watery quality of the represented image. In the more representational images, her impressionist strokes of multifaceted hues, which upon closer viewing, appear as loose horizontal applications of paint and from afar, coalesce into variegated reflections on the water. In many of the images, vertical patterns of floating heart-shaped green forms dangle above the lilies, brilliantly indicating a foreground of hanging leaves from trees not seen fully in the image.
Her cropping and the relationships formed between canvases are also especially unique. While several larger scale paintings lined the right side of the gallery in a more traditional wall hanging, on the left, an appealing approach to installation challenged perceptions of the work from painting to sculpture. By stacking about 15 to 20 square shaped compositions in a pyramidal form on the floor and leaned against the wall, a new relationship between the various compositions emerged, playing with both the idea of architecture as well as with the form of the painting as a substitute for a window into her world. Correspondingly, in the back annex room of the gallery, a series of square paintings, were lined up like a miniature wall on the floor. Such approaches to installing the work were exciting and welcome updates on the classic language of impressionist painting, which while radical at its time, has now become the standard bearer of traditional painting. Not afraid to push boundaries and expand her oeuvre, Livijn’s concomitant practice in ceramics and design is particularly evident in such works.
Perhaps the most striking quality above all else in these works is Livijn’s attention to the subtle and magical power of light. Her use of gold leaf embedded within the paint surface as well as the restrained use of color, engender luminescent surfaces that glow with a special radiance not usually encountered by work of this kind. There is an understated incandescence to these images that is nostalgic and mystical all at once. She positions herself in the theatrical realm through her sculptural quotations of a Friedian post-minimalism, yet counters this through the dream-like fantastical quality of the imagery—not quite Surreal, yet not quite there, as if some ghostly memory from a heavenly far-away place; this work resonates with the viewer long after she has left the gallery.
