Maria Erikson’s solo exhibition Soft Touch on the Deckle opens in The Museum of Lithography (Litografiska Museet) on April 23rd, 2023, opening reception at 12–3 pm. Exhibition is open until May 14th, 2023.
With the body of work Soft Touch on the Deckle, the artist focuses on the process and the materiality of print, emphasizing small movements of water and oil, as well as the meeting points between surfaces of the stone, paper and the body of the artist. Erikson has produced her own lithographic tusche, a drawing material that is diluted with solvents brushed on the stone in its liquid form. Dried coatings of tusche washes on the surface of the stone result in reticulation, that can be seen as an abstract landscape. In the printing process both matter and meaning are compressed on the paper by the pressure of the press. In this way, the paper becomes a site of communication where touch between the artist and the material as well as the stone´s geological strata are intertwined. Through these interactions and contact events new forms of co-existence and non-hierarchical ways of communication emerge.
Soft Touch on the Deckle is a three-part exhibition project – the first part took place at Draakon gallery in Tallinn (January 2023), the second one is exhibited in Ratamo gallery, and the third part is held in the Museum of Lithography in Sweden in April 2023.
Engagement and contact are central in Maria Erikson’s artistic practice. With the focus on materiality and materials as sets of relationships, she investigates visible and non-visible relations that are produced by the gestures between them. In new structural arrangements she investigates their jointness and indifferences, bodiliness and ability to inhabit shared space. Maria Erikson has completed two-year studies as a collaborative lithography printer and holds a Master Printer certificate from Tamarind Institute (USA) and obtained MA degree in the printmaking study area at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki. In 2019, Maria Erikson received the Eduard Wiiralt grant and in 2021 she was awarded with Ann-Margret Lindell Grant for Printmaking (Sweden). Among her recent exhibitions are Notes from Borderspace (ARS Project Space, 2022); Grafik (Gallery Sander, Norrköping, Sweden, 2021), Ideal Landscapes, Göteborgs Konstförening, Lilla Galleriet, Gothenburg, Sweden, 2020).
Exhibition is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Sveriges Konstföreningar (The National Association of Swedish Art Societies)
The artist thanks: Liina Siib, Paul Rannik, Caroline Pajusaar, department of graphic art at the Estonian Academy of Arts, Helena Nordlander Terud, Linda Samuelsson.