Mia Malmlöf's art is searching and outward-looking, and it engages in conversation with great visual joy. A painting with both emotional and analytical relationships to color and form, where symbolism is combined with strong visuality.

Nature is the starting point for an existential seriousness in ornamental paintings, often in large formats.

Malmlöf paints directly with dancing rhythms and charged colors that attract and confuse. It provides visual interplay between the figurative and the non-figurative that teases the gaze that tries to find points of support. But in vain – the paintings provide rocking resistance. But embedded in her art is a contact-seeking movement in the image from the image space and to the viewer.

It is a communicative painting without simple interpretations, and requires active vision.

In the large composition “Reservat” an almost monochrome forest is painted as if floating in a looming mist. But the color scale has an intense luster that strikes as a counterpoint to the introversion of the landscape. “Reservat” provides interactive resistance; one is forced to sharpen one’s gaze. It is a symbolic color painting with pairs of opposites that both pull apart and want to unite.

Malmlöf has been working for a couple of decades with the theme of the garden, which is an overarching metaphor for life and meaning-making. But the theme is rooted in the climate issue and carries doubts.

Today we live in a culture of diversity where the threads of culture seem to converge and now also with environmental issues, and the earth needs its artists.

The hanging in the Royal Academy of Fine Arts' Galleri Väst and Atelier may bring to mind the gardens of Baroque aesthetics or the mysticism of Etruscan tomb art, as it is scenographically conceived as an illusory walk in a garden.

The different rooms open like flaps one by one, and the process creates a ritual loop that embodies our relationship with nature.

The exhibition features a kind of centerpiece in the form of a three-dimensional installation, "If Birds Are Silent", a plexiglass room with water and bird chirping.

A piece of pop art on the theme of rebirth – both down-to-earth and archaic.

© Anders Engman