“Hannah 2” – Conceptual portrait of a woman by Erlend Steiner Lovisa, oil on canvas

Erlend Steiner Lovisa (1970) paints still-life portraits of women in his own staged environments. The woman depicted has a story to tell. Her face is obscured by her hair, leaving it to our own imagination to explore the story hidden behind it. Erlend photographs his subjects and paints from these images. He stages the scene with subjects taken from their everyday surroundings and placed on a beach, in a forest, in a field, or even against a wall. By obscuring the subjects' faces, Erlend compels the viewer to guess the story behind the scene. Why is she sitting there? What is she hiding? The woman is fleeting, ephemeral, enslaved, and compels us to want to uncover her secrets. In his latest series, "With Heart and Soul," the artist adds a new element to his paintings: taxidermied animals, stuffed animals mounted on a piece of wood. The combination of the dead animals' hair (the wigs) held by the girls and the dead animals' hair itself is more than symbolic. The women are cuddling with death. Reality and fiction, life and death, beauty and the transience of all things—or is it simply the secret of eternal life? In these fascinating works, everything comes very close together.