Maria Nordin – Overload

Bodies twisting, bodies interacting, bodies in space. The human body always plays the major role in the work of Maria Nordin (b. 1980): an emerging, yet already highly acclaimed artist who explores the interaction between motif, material and viewer.

“When it comes to watercolour, it has a life of its own: you can’t be in control all the time.”

– Maria Nordin

The flowing watercolour and pigments in Nordin’s paintings may have their own life, but the artist handles them with total virtuosity; watercolour is her principal medium. Her paintings can be said to freeze the moment. The clock has stopped and she captures a single movement, shrouded by her fascination with the human body and its existence in the world: a world in which - for good and bad - the mind is subject to the body. The result of the encounter between the bodies on paper and the body of the viewer is a sensory experience that excludes everything else and kindles a physical sensation.

Fabric used in various forms is a particular hallmark of the paintings in this exhibition. It serves not only as a tactile landscape that interacts with the architecture of Kunsten, but also as an image of profusion and the sense of being lost in the age in which we live.

Overload is Maria Nordin’s first solo exhibition at a museum outside Sweden.

^{Maria Nordin: Cascade (2023) Watercolour on paper, 120 x 96.5 cm. Photo: Galleri Magnus Karlsson}

 ^{The picture at the top: Maria Nordin: Following You (2023) Watercolour on paper, 103 x 142 cm. Photo: Galleri Magnus Karlsson}