Mia Malmlöf's art is searching and outward-looking and engages in conversation with great visual joy. A painting with the relationship of both feeling and analysis to color and form, where symbolism is combined with strong visuality.

Nature is the starting point for an existential seriousness in ornamental paintings, often in large formats.

Malmlöf paints directly with dancing rhythms and charged colors that attract and confuse. It provides visual interplay between figurative and non-figurative that teases the eye trying to find points of support. But in vain – the paintings offer tilting resistance. But embedded in her art is a contact-seeking movement in the image from the picture room and to the viewer.

It is a communicative painting without simple interpretations, and requires active vision.

In the large composition "Reservat", an almost monochrome forest is painted as floating in a looming haze. But the color scale has intense luster that strikes as a counterpoint to the landscape's introversion. "Reserved" provides interactive resistance; you are forced to sharpen your gaze. It is a symbolic color painting with pairs of opposites that both pull apart and want to unite.

Malmlöf has been working for a couple of decades with the theme of the garden, which is an overarching metaphor for life and meaning-making. But the theme is rooted in the climate issue and carries doubts.

Today we live in a culture of diversity where the threads of culture seem to run together and nowadays also with the environmental issue, and the earth needs its artists.

The hanging in the Art Academy's Gallery West and Atelier can bring the mind to the gardens of baroque aesthetics or to the mysticism of Etruscan tomb art, as it is scenographically conceived as an illusory walk in a garden.

The different rooms open up like flaps one by one, and the action creates a ritual loop that embodies our relationship with nature.

In the exhibition, there is a kind of center in the form of a three-dimensional installation, "If the Birds Are Silent", a Plexiglas room with water and birdsong.

A piece of pop art on the theme of rebirth - both earthy and archaic.

© Anders Engman