Interview: Erik Viwin
Luca Curci talks with Erik Viwin during the 20th edition of VENICE INTERNATIONAL ART FAIR 2024 at Palazzo Albrizzi-Capello in Venice.

Born in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1957, Erik Viwin is a Swedish artist known for blending natural inspiration with innovative techniques. Trained at the Royal Institute of Art (1981-1986), Erik Viwin held an acclaimed solo exhibition at Gallery Louis De Geer in 1988, establishing a strong Nordic presence. With works evolving to an international scope, Erik Viwin most recently exhibited at the Venice International Art Fair 2024, reflecting a career dedicated to exploring beauty, meaning, and humanity.

Luca Curci – How did you get to your current artistic practice?
Erik Viwin – You could say that I am schooled in a classical artistic tradition with model and space, color and form studies. Also geometry studies in 2 and 3 dimensions in combination with color for a longer period. Art history is omnipresent and alive for me with children’s drawings, cave paintings, art from different cultures and artists such as Piero della Francesca, Leonardo Da Vinci, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, Joan Mitchell, Francis Bacon, Sidney Nolan and Åke Göransson. My early works were a consequence of my geometry studies which were later implemented in more conceptual mixed media, painting, form and photography. Drawing is the core of my work as an artist with recurring studies of human and space. Over time, my artistic process has shifted to a more ”reverse” approach where the drawing/painting informally and automatically gradually guides the process forward.

LC – What are your thoughts while you paint? Do you have any habits or rituals while you work?
EV – A need/impulse/intention makes me start the artistic process, choose material, size and find an entrance which can sometimes take a longer time and otherwise comes down immediately. Over time I have developed a more improvisational/informal (automatic) approach in interaction with the painting. A kinship with music in a quote: crystallized time where the painting is built up with basic tones, sounds, timbres and rhythms which can then be said that color and form lead me to the theme that may come during the process or when the painting enters its final phase and the parts “fall into place”. I draw and paint together with music often randomly from a radio channel with classical/jazz and international cultural music.

LC – Did your style change over the years? In which way?
EV – My artistic ”style” has changed to a more open and searching approach and unpredictability where the artistic process which can be said to be the subject is likened to setting out on an adventure/discovery that you don’t know in advance where it will end, just guess. In my meeting with Emanuel Swedenborg’s writings, from what I can see, the existential mysticism and the infinitely multifaceted creation have crept in like a fairy tale creature. If God hides behind a curtain, Leonardo Da Vinci has also initiated us via rebus-like riddles some kind of direction for us to continue exploring. It can be equally surprising every time that the recently completed work still thematically falls into a variation in the sequence/flow of previous works, where one speaks to the other. But it is always the case that if you can somehow get closer, it may be in the next work that has not yet begun.

LC – In which way the artwork presented in our exhibition is connected with the exhibition’s theme?
EV – The theme of the Itsliquid Art Fair exhibition contributed to my application with the painting “Map of a day at the beach” which visually fluctuates in a form of floating spatial formations and associative “future” landscapes. The painting “Map of a day at the beach” is part of a series/flow of artistic works which land in a region of abstraction and possibly associative recognitions and new discoveries. Can one say that it starts from nothing and approaches something which hopefully is in the eye of the beholder?

LC – What are your suggestions about our services? Is there something more we can provide to artists?
EV – Looking forward to it and it would be rewarding if we can develop a collaboration and contact network for continued exhibition activities for group, solo exhibitions and projects like interdisciplinary collaboration with architects. It is desirable that our collaboration can then lead further both within the Itsliquid group and to collaboration partners internationally.