π and around. Works by Eva Löfdahl
30 May – 6 September 2009

Eva Löfdahl, born 1953, emerged in the early 1980s and is rightly regarded as one of Sweden’s most significant and innovative artists. She was always interested in how concepts are created and conveyed in art. Throughout the years she has worked in many different techniques and formats: painting, drawing, sculpture, text-based investigations, large-scale public art commissions for urban space and institutional settings. She has participated in numerous exhibitions in Sweden and internationally, representing Sweden at the Venice Biennale 1995. Her works are in many public and private collections.

Lunds konsthall is proud to present a substantial solo exhibition by Eva Löfdahl, comprising works from 1995–2009. The selected works are pronouncedly visual, investigating and illuminating concepts that language would barely manage to articulate on its own. Eva Löfdahl’s art requires an active and thoughtful viewer, but it is by no means unwilling to engage with the world or to communicate. On the contrary, she cuts straight into societal issues and contemporary intellectual debates, and she often uses methods and forms borrowed from science.

The exhibition title, π and around, evokes classical geometry and its fundamental concepts, whose potential for stimulating creative thinking is nowhere close to being exhausted by science. The irrational number π expresses the relation between a circle’s circumference and its diameter and must be written with an infinite number of decimals. π is the image of constancy, remaining the same regardless of context or individual initiative, while also serving as a perpetual reminder of the strong pull that the unfinished and the unsolvable exert on us.

π and around consists of three-dimensional works that are more or less easily decipherable, more or less sculptural. Yet what the exhibition really does is to show something that exists around visible form, outside tangible objects and beyond the habitual three dimensions. Eva Löfdahl has conceived and ordered the display at Lunds konsthall as a non-linear, non-hierarchical text. At the same time she offers a carefully planned trajectory through the exhibition space and through her artistic thinking. Cool logic and visual reduction meet mystical self-contradiction. In particular, the many new works in the exhibition demonstrate Eva Löfdahl’s ability to make seemingly simple and direct plastic forms carry complex mental messages that are both worrying and uplifting.

Lunds konsthall thanks Eva Löfdahl for the inspiring collaboration on π and around and also thanks the lenders, both private collectors and the Malmö Art Museum. Without their dedication and generosity the exhibition would not have been possible.