Siri Elfhag - 2020

"The Fredrik Roos Stiftel's scholarship in 2020 is awarded to Siri Elfhag for a painting with close ties to European art history. Her work has a tendency to leave the corporeal and float out into a universe that is close to the interface of surrealism between the dreamlike scenery of the external and digitized reality. The paintings give a feeling that painting is dissolving itself from within in a changeability that is related to the figures of the expressionist tradition.”

In conversation with Siri Elfhag

The following conversation took place as an email exchange between Siri Elfhag and Iselin Page, 2019.

“What can I say, O dear art lovers, O kind-hearted dreamers? Need help? Doesn't the painting say it all? What am I looking for? A long time ago I said that I wanted to seduce through imperceptible movements from one reality to another. The viewer is caught in a net and can only break free by walking through the entire painting until the exit is found. My greatest desire: to create a trap from which no one, neither you nor I, can escape.”

- Dorothea Tanning, 1986

It is the month of December and the winter darkness has settled over Stockholm, but it doesn't matter for Artipelag has just received the colorful news that the Fredrik Roos Foundation has appointed Siri Elfhag as the year's scholarship holder 2020. Time is short to produce an exhibition and a directory and we immediately contact Siri. Two days later we will meet at Café Kafferepet in central Stockholm. Surrounded by pensioners, we sit there each with an almond cake and a cup of coffee to discuss the upcoming production. We decided to follow up the meeting with a digital exchange of letters that can later be published in the catalog to include Siri's voice. After the meeting, the curiosity about Siri's work and process has become stronger and I get the feeling that there is a personal depth in her paintings that I want to explore. The ball is in my court, and I send my first question to Siri.

Iselin Page:

I feel that your paintings possess a sensitive power that makes me see my surroundings differently. I immediately think of how an emotionally inclined painter allows his painting to reap the fruits of personal experience. You yourself describe your artistry with words like "emotional cannibalism". To what extent do you use your personal experiences such as relationships, dreams or fantasies in your works?

Siri Elfhag:

I am inspired by everything that has ever happened in my life and other people's lives, and by man's countless attempts, with mixed results, to deal with and process these events, transforming them into something "good". I think a lot about evil and what it looks like inside different people, what colors it could be. And if everyone's private perception has anything to do with reality. Images we carry with us quite involuntarily, inner symbolic landscapes for which we hardly know who is responsible. Something I have worked with almost consistently ever since I started painting is a theme that was first unspoken and then named "emotional cannibalism". I think I've been working on the same thing all along, actually before I started painting as well. Maybe as far back as when I was a child and playing. Often I played family or relationships, it could be anything, any objects or objects that were part of different kinds of relationships. And I played the same kind of games over and over again. The one who seeks contact and the one who answers, accepts or rejects. I remember the day I stopped playing, I was 12 years old. And picked up my barbie dolls to once again start a game that suddenly felt unnatural, artificial.

"We played with barbies, where we put on and took off their sunglasses so their wide eyes made us cringe."

It didn't work anymore. I was struck by sadness and a need to create grew instead, to be able to evoke the same type of scenes that once took place in the game, but this time in words and images. I drew and wrote. And in the last year of preparatory art school, I started with oil painting. From the beginning I thought that my painting was not about anything, that it was just different attempts to master the brush or paint. But then I started to see stories in the pictures that seemed to fit together. Relationship stories. And just as from the very beginning, it is not only relationships between people, but also between animals or objects, dead things that live. And what they are all dealing with is a desperate, eternal quest to try to meet, be close to each other and understand each other. Even if it's the forest trying to get along with the beasts or whatever it is that plays in it.

Iselin Page:

As a viewer of your works, I can't help but see myself exactly as you describe the motifs, in an eternal quest to try to meet, be close and understand. It is as if the works convey a strong sense of a narrative. I am invited to a landscape of stories that

I can never really understand. Can you recognize the description that among your surreal elements rests something mysterious and enigmatic?

Siri Elfhag:

In my work, in art in general or perhaps in everything, the mysterious is also the most indispensable. Someone described my painting as the motifs "morphing" in and out of each other and never really standing still. I am interested in how external and internal images interact or conflict with each other, both when it comes to our actual seeing and what emotions we add (perspective) that affect the appearance of things. Not being able to really understand, as you say, is also what makes sense to me. If something has too definite a shape, I want to loosen it up. There is a story but at the same time it can sometimes seem impossible to handle. Managing feels like control, and I don't want that. I am also constantly practicing letting go of the need to preserve or own my images and to not take what appears too personally. Letting them come and go as they please and instead be surprised by what sticks on the screen, which is difficult.

Iselin Page:

It is interesting to read when you talk about the emotional and personal behind your works, but I would also like to know more about your process, method and choice of materials. I perceive you and your artistry as very open to expansion through a continuous development that is not limited to painting. How do you relate to the different disciplines you work in? Do you have a specific process or working method that you want to tell us about?

Siri Elfhag:

I would describe my work process as working with layers, where different picture stories are first formed for the upper and lower layers of consciousness and then my attempts to transform these on the canvas. Therefore, the paintings also almost always consist of very many layers that have been applied gradually. Sometimes I work on a painting for several months, sometimes for a few hours. Often I paint over existing paintings and sometimes also other people's paintings. Several of the works I did at art school were originally found works by a deceased hobby artist whose belongings were to be thrown away. I took care of some of the paintings and used their motifs to create new ones. When I made the Dream Book, I used the app Instagram as a tool. From the massive flow of images, I collected hundreds of images of mainly historical paintings or photography. Then I made a kind of intuitive selection. It could be a color or a contour, a shape that "felt good" for the moment. I didn't study the pictures I chose right away, but looked at them briefly and kind of photographed them from memory, as I think most people do without thinking about it. With a vague memory image as a starting point, I then drew something else. Something I discovered with this method was that when I went back to the original image, after the drawing was completed, there was always something, some element that marked the events of the day. A kind of key to unlock the subconscious and access another layer of myself.

Iselin Page:

Even though you are a recent graduate, you already have a sureness of style and maturity in your works that make the mind flow towards a Central European and American painting tradition. When I look at your work, I immediately think of artists like Willem de Kooning and Dorothea Tanning. I get the feeling that there are international influences and a strong painting tradition at the art school in Umeå. What have five years at that school meant to you in your artistic development?

Siri Elfhag:

When I was admitted to Umeå, there was a lot of painting at the school and a tradition of painting as you say. But during my years of study, teachers were continuously changed and I felt perhaps that the only fixed point in the end was the building itself. I probably also retreated to my own studio quite a lot. Socially, I would say that the time in Umeå has influenced me the most. Without the people and events that took place there, no art would have been created either. Umeå has sometimes seemed more surreal to me than the paintings I made. But in the end, perhaps all contexts are equally incomprehensible.