Marcus Eek
Sunshine & Love
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Sunshine & Love is Marcus Eek’s third solo exhibition at the Helsinki Contemporary gallery. It continues the Swedish painters deepening engagement with the traditions of painting; as someone who renews and updates its basic questions, taking them into pieces again and again.
Eek’s touch as a painter is more and more superb. He can and dares to use elements that could lead into a clichéd dead end. Instead of stopping up, with a feeling mixed with terror, or showing off in a tiresome way, Eek, in his new exhibition, picks up more speed – without shunning from danger, and without sparing the colours.
The final result is a piece of picturesque fireworks; a set of works produced during the summer, which offers both visual candy, and demands that you throw yourself into it in a physical way. It’s a burning sensation of sun on your skin, it’s love in the cool shadows and it’s complete passion in the midday shade.
Eek flirts openly with the catastrophes of the motives that are allowed, and those of the colour combinations and compositions – and emerges time and time again out of the encounter, as the winner.
In the work that bears the name of the exhibition, Sunshine & Love, Eek offers us an assortment well-known to us: an alternation between assumptions and expectations. The work is something quite ordinary, but is made in a way that tears and rips, cuddles and caresses. It is exactly what it is. It’s a flower bouquet at home in a vase on a tablecloth, but in the form of a painting that gives colour and vibrates.
As a painting, it’s always much more than what it depicts. The yellow of the painting gives speed to the viewing experience, which takes us up, up, up, only and exclusively so that its accomplice in the colour drama, that dark orange, will take us down, down, down. And in between, in between, the painting experience is being updated.
The painting actively becomes part of the room, of the social intercourse.
It’s movement. Being in the company of the painting, remaining in that room and that situation, looking again and again, immersing yourself – pleasure.
Marcus Eek (born in 1968 in Stockholm) is a Swedish artist who lives and works in Berlin. The elements and motives that you can recognize in his paintings, which are full of colours and made with thick brush strokes, are the point of departure for the works that are shaped on an abstract level.
Eek graduated from The Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm in 1997. He has held several solo exhibitions in Sweden and has participated in group exhibitions in the Nordic Countries and in Europe. Sunshine & Love is the third solo exhibition in its series at Helsinki Contemporary (Minnesluckor | Black-Outs 2008, Extra Real 2010). The last time we could see the artist’s works in the gallery was at the group exhibition Muscle Temple Painting Society in the autumn of 2012.
Eek’s touch as a painter is more and more superb. He can and dares to use elements that could lead into a clichéd dead end. Instead of stopping up, with a feeling mixed with terror, or showing off in a tiresome way, Eek, in his new exhibition, picks up more speed – without shunning from danger, and without sparing the colours.
The final result is a piece of picturesque fireworks; a set of works produced during the summer, which offers both visual candy, and demands that you throw yourself into it in a physical way. It’s a burning sensation of sun on your skin, it’s love in the cool shadows and it’s complete passion in the midday shade.
Eek flirts openly with the catastrophes of the motives that are allowed, and those of the colour combinations and compositions – and emerges time and time again out of the encounter, as the winner.
In the work that bears the name of the exhibition, Sunshine & Love, Eek offers us an assortment well-known to us: an alternation between assumptions and expectations. The work is something quite ordinary, but is made in a way that tears and rips, cuddles and caresses. It is exactly what it is. It’s a flower bouquet at home in a vase on a tablecloth, but in the form of a painting that gives colour and vibrates.
As a painting, it’s always much more than what it depicts. The yellow of the painting gives speed to the viewing experience, which takes us up, up, up, only and exclusively so that its accomplice in the colour drama, that dark orange, will take us down, down, down. And in between, in between, the painting experience is being updated.
The painting actively becomes part of the room, of the social intercourse.
It’s movement. Being in the company of the painting, remaining in that room and that situation, looking again and again, immersing yourself – pleasure.
Marcus Eek (born in 1968 in Stockholm) is a Swedish artist who lives and works in Berlin. The elements and motives that you can recognize in his paintings, which are full of colours and made with thick brush strokes, are the point of departure for the works that are shaped on an abstract level.
Eek graduated from The Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm in 1997. He has held several solo exhibitions in Sweden and has participated in group exhibitions in the Nordic Countries and in Europe. Sunshine & Love is the third solo exhibition in its series at Helsinki Contemporary (Minnesluckor | Black-Outs 2008, Extra Real 2010). The last time we could see the artist’s works in the gallery was at the group exhibition Muscle Temple Painting Society in the autumn of 2012.
Exhibition view: Sunshine & Love
2013
Photo by Mikaela Lostedt
Exhibition view: Sunshine & Love
2013
Photo by Jussi Tiainen
Exhibition view: Sunshine & Love
2013
Photo by Jussi Tiainen
Exhibition view: Sunshine & Love
2013
Photo by Jussi Tiainen