Elisabeth Frieberg - Island Highway : Stockholm

It is with great pleasure we announce the opening of Island Highway, Elisabeth Frieberg’s first solo-exhibition at Andréhn-Schiptjenko.

Frieberg is a painter whose process is deeply rooted in the experience of nature, translating her observations from personally important places around the world onto canvas. The colours and temperament embedded in these surroundings, along with the exploration of scale, rhythm and time, all make for essential aspects of her investigative abstract painting. Her precise compositions are powerful yet lacking any visible action. Her canvases are unprimed and the sometimes bare surfaces are a deliberate part of the work, just as while some paintings imply the image continues beyond the physical constraints of the canvas, others are literally framed.

The exhibition title Island Highway refers to the road that follows the eastern coastline of Vancouver Island, Canada. Frieberg travelled to Canada to see Macklin, the birthplace of Agnes Martin, as well as Vancouver (where Martin grew up) and Squamish, a small mountain town. The works on view are to a large extent informed by the physical and spiritual experience of these landscapes, the view of endless fields of dry wheat, the sensation of seeing the earth curve at the horizon, a prairie not unlike the desert of Taos, New Mexico, a destination of previous travels.

The new works presented in Island Highway are of a resolutely different scheme of colours than Frieberg’s earlier works – the presence of solid black in the landscapes, new variations of green from the Pacific Ocean. The scale is large, like North America.

Frieberg (b. 1977, Stjärnhov, Sweden) lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden. She received her MFA from Umeå Academy of Fine Arts and has been lecturing at Konstfack, Stockholm since 2016. Frieberg’s work has recently been the subject of a private presentation at Magasin III Museum & Foundation for Contemporary Art, Stockholm and she has previously exhibited at institutions such as Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm, Sweden, Ivan Aguéli Museum, Sala, Sweden, Fondazione Cini, Venice, Italy and Uppsala Art Museum, Uppsala, Sweden.