A girl with a bow in her hair, walking through a threatening landscape. White water lilies in a murky forest pond. Maya Eizin Öijer juxtaposes pain with pleasure. A retrospective exhibition at Bildmuseet presents around 50 of her works from the period 1980 to 2004.
Eizin Öijer moves amid the landscape of dreams, imagination and the subconscious. Her imagery is charged with symbols associated with myths and archetypes. She combines different techniques such as photography, painting, silkscreen and computer-generated images. She adopted the mass media image early on, combining newspaper clippings with images of older works of art. During the postmodern era of the 1980s, she made frequent references to historical artistic styles such as baroque and rococo, including in her series Vanitas, Continence and Fragonard.
A three-year stay in Tokyo in the early 1980s had a major impact on Eizin Öijer and her art. Japanese influences recur throughout her body of work – the sharp contrasts between ancient tradition and extreme modernity, a feeling for the aesthetic surface, manga culture, and the proximity between eroticism and violence.
Eizin Öijer’s latest work is characterised by memory and contemplation. The 2002 suite Wilderness interweaves classic paintings of Nordic landscapes with dreamlike fragments of the past. In 2004’s Mirror I and Mirror II, two giant, delicate white water lilies stand in contrast with the dark, murky water of a forest lake.
Maya Eizin Öijer (born 1946) lives and works in Stockholm. She has studied at Stockholm’s Royal Institute of Art and Tokyo University of the Arts, and has held numerous exhibitions in Sweden and abroad. In 1994–95 she was a professor at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm.
The exhibition has been produced by – and recently premiered at – Bohusläns Museum’s Contemporary Art Gallery. It is accompanied by a newly published book about Eizin Öijer’s art, including plentiful images and texts by Lars O. Ericsson, Jan-Erik Lundström and John Peter Nilsson.
