Image courtesy of the artist.
Swedish artist Malin Molin's visual language references the body without reducing it to notions of appearance or ownership. Her figurative works investigate the relationship between images, desires, and the body. Visually, they are colour-saturated, still-life depictions of food. Metaphorically, our daily consumption of images morphs with the body’s metabolic system - allowing Molin to dissect the realm of human desires.
Her paintings - which aim for a physical reaction through their over-the-top, baroque rendering - are also characterised by carefully-arranged compositions, a vivid colour palette, and highly-polished, glossy finishes. They offer a beautiful balance between fascination, appeal, repulsiveness, and a certain degree of grotesque.
Images collected online are employed as templates - as such, these digital representations are reintroduced into physical reality. Molin draws inspiration from the historical tradition of still-life and from 17th century Western painting, while looking at a very contemporary question: one's experience of existing as an individual on the Internet today, and our image gluttony.
In the artist's own words:
The relationship between image and desire, and between image and the body, is something I have turned and twisted within my practice. Over the years, I tested different methods, searching for a painterly language that can discuss the body without exclusively focusing on what it looks like, or whom it belongs to. I gather my reference materials from social media and digital advertising because I feel that such images trigger our physical sensations in an intrusive manner. My hope is to point out the pornographic gaze that our image-obsessed culture evokes, and bridge the distancing from our own bodies, which is created by this gaze.
Malin Molin was born in 1989 in Gothenburg, Sweden, where she continues to work and live. She holds an MFA from the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm (2021) and a BFA from the Chelsea College of Art, London and the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm (2016).
____
Participating artists: Linda Bäckström, Anna Camner, Ylva Ceder, Nathalia Edenmont, Liva Isakson Lundin, Dina Isæus-Daggfeldt, Peter Johansson, Love Lundell, Malin Molin, Fredrik Nielsen, Anna Pajak, Amy Simon.
