KEWENIG is pleased to announce ‘Room #4’ with two large oil paintings by Elisabeth Frieberg, ‘Bat Seba, No. 4’, 2017 and ‘King David’, 2017. The presentation is part of the gallery’s new exhibition format ‘12 Rooms’, a monthly rotating artist programme in the enclosed room between the gallery and the adjacent building. Each month a new installation by a selected young artist will be on display.

Mainly working with painting, Elisabeth Frieberg’s abstractions of nature are built up through several overlapping layers of vivid colours on canvas, juxtaposing diverse patterns either in a process of tape-masking and extraction or with gestural, frivolous brushstrokes. Whether reanimating the languages of geometric abstraction, Fauvism, or Op Art, Frieberg’s visual vocabulary inhabits its own space of time. She creates personal geographies which are derived from her experience of nature and cultural apprehension. This sensitivity is translated into large abstract paintings that address notions of time and space, order and disorder, as well as our place in respect to nature.

The figures Bathsheba and King David serve as subjects of Frieberg’s abstract portraits, recalling their biblical love story, rewritten in 1984 by Swedish author Torgny Lindgren (1938 – 2017). As much as King David, mesmerised by the beauty of Bathsheba, is compelled to dance around her, Frieberg’s energetic brushstrokes generate a pulse of colour and light, suggestive of a musical composition or an intimate dance.

With references to historical avant-gardes, biblical narratives, classical mythology, graphic design, or abstract painting, Elisabeth Frieberg’s art, for all its sources, has a singular effect: her work challenges our perception, of what is a deliberate, meticulous act of abstraction and what is intuitive. Playing with rhythm and scale her gestural painting style interferes with the rigid structure of her paintings, combining a degree of coincidence and a certain control generated by the geometrical compositions.

Elisabeth Frieberg, born in 1977 in Stjärnhov, Sweden, currently lives and works in Stockholm. In 2010 she obtained her Masters degree in Fine Arts at Umeå Academy of Fine Arts, Sweden.From 2016 to 2018 Frieberg taught at Konstfack, the largest Art Academy of Sweden. Frieberg has received various scholarships, among them from The Swedish Arts Grants Committee, the Ester Lindahl Foundation, The Olle Baertling Foundation and The Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts.

Her work has been exhibited at Magasin III Museum & Foundation for Contemporary Art, Stockholm (2017); The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm (2016); Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm (2016); Uppsala Konstmuseum, Uppsala (2015); and Fondazione Cini, Venice (2015). Frieberg’s works are included in public collections such as Magasin III, Stockholm, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, The National Public Art Council Sweden, and the Aguélimuseet, Sala.