Bonniers Konsthall is very proud to present She in Four Acts, Ylva Ogland’s most extensive solo exhibition to date.
Born in 1974 in Umeå in northern Sweden, Ylva Ogland is one of the brightest artistic stars of her generation. From a very early age she developed a unique artistic language, delving into the entire register offered by painting. To Ogland, painting is both a language in and of itself, as well as a state in which she creates quickly and confidently, without sketching or relying on assistance from devices such as projections. She surrounds herself with and regularly returns to her motifs, which consist of personal mythologies rooted in her individual life experiences. Her paintings often include installation elements and ritualistic performances, as she processes such subjects as memory, death and different states and levels of consciousness, while also addressing the line between art and reality.
In the exhibition She in Four Acts, Ogland utilizes both the platform and history of theatre, as well as the relationship between film and theatre. The four acts form a story that gradually unfolds. Each act is introduced by a pink painting of a curtain with a hole cut out of the canvas, serving as a passage between various states. The acts continue with sceneries in shifting colour scales through which Ogland leads the viewer between “the shadow world,” “death,” “birth,” and “the real world.”
Ylva Ogland will use the first room – act 1 – as her studio throughout the exhibition. In this studio installation entitled The Painter’s Studio, Shadow World, she will be working on a large-scale painting depicting the exhibition as it is taking place. She will also paint grey-scaled, silhouetted replications of the curtain paintings separating the exhibitions acts. These will then be transported to Drottningholms Slottsteater, where they will form a part of the exhibition’s epilogue.
A prologue to the exhibition was held in March of this year at Drottningholms Slottsteater, as Ylva Ogland performed the ritual She Acts 1-4, A Reflection of the Combined Memory of the Births of Sibylla and Xenia, where she cut holes in the curtain paintings used to separate the exhibition’s rooms and acts at Bonniers Konsthall.
Ylva Ogland studied at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. She has lived and worked in New York, Berlin and Stockholm, where she is currently based. She has exhibited internationally at venues such as Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Center For Contemporary Art Ujadowski Castle in Warsaw and Performa in New York and is represented in numerous collections, including at Bonniers Konsthall, The Modern Museum of Art in Stockholm, The Gothenburg Museum of Art, and the Chichu Art Museum and Naoshima Fukutake Art Museum Foundation, both in Japan.
As this year’s guest artist at Bonniers Konsthall, Ylva Ogland produced many of the pieces included in this exhibition specifically for the museum. A comprehensive book will be published along with the exhibition. In 2010, Ogland was also a contributing artist to the Bonniers Konsthall exhibition Scene Shifts.
