"Witkam 1" (2009) - Acrylic painting by Erlend Steiner Lovisa

Erlend Steiner Lovisa (1970) paints still life portraits of women in his own staged environments. The woman depicted has to tell a story. Your face is covered by her hair and it is up to our own imagination to research the history hidden behind it. Erlend photographs his motifs and paints from it. He stages the scene with the motifs that are taken out of their everyday environment and placed on a beach, in a forest, on a field or even on a wall. By hiding the face of the test subjects, Erlend is forcing the viewer to guess the story behind the scene. Why does she sit there? What hides? The woman is fleeting, fleeting, enslaved and forces us to want to ventilate her secrets. In his latest series "With Heart and Soul", the artist adds a new element to his paintings: preparers, soft toys attached to a piece of wood. The combination of the hair of the dead animals (the wigs) that the girls hold, and the hair of the dead animals is more than symbolic. The women cuddle with death. Reality and fiction, life and death, beauty and the transience of everything - or is it just the secret of eternal life? In these fascinating works everything comes very close together.