We are delighted to start the autumn season with Ebba Svensson’s exhibition Sly. Ebba Svensson (b. 1997) received great attention in connection with the Royal Institute of Arts’ spring exhibition in 2023 and at her solo presentation with the gallery at the Market Art Fair 2024. Sly is her first solo exhibition at the gallery and it presents a series of paintings completed over the past year.

The exhibition title Sly can be used in both Swedish and English to describe its content and characteristics. The Swedish word Sly, a dense and tangled vegetation with shrubs or young trees, is linked to the imagery, while the English adjective Sly may refer to a quality in the painting; something misleading and elusive.

In Ebba Svensson’s paintings, there is a membrane or haze that divides the image into a foreground and a background. We are faced with a choice: to wander with our gaze on its surface or to step into its space. The intricacy that winds its way across the canvas reaches out towards the viewer and down into the depths of the painting. Roots that twist and cling, and branches that stretch away. In some works, the motif itself is also a water surface, a double exposure of the reflection and the transparent. Perhaps they can be seen as snapshots of a reality that is constantly changing? A stem or a branch breaks free from the thicket and resembles handwriting, like an invitation to stay.

Ebba Svensson’s large-scale paintings exist in a borderland between figurative and abstract art. The starting point is images of nature and landscapes, but in the working process the motifs become increasingly dissolved, with the focus shifting to materiality rather than subject matter. In recent years, Svensson has developed a unique technique in which she applies oil paint in numerous short strokes with small, hard, handmade brushes on a hide glue-primed and pigmented cotton canvas. It is a dry, repetitive painting technique that is reminiscent of sewing and drawing with dry pastels. The surfaces of the often monumental paintings can be compared to a strangely vibrating painterly noise.