Galleri Flach has the great pleasure to introduce a series of new paintings by Lisa D Manner in the exhibition Whereabouts. It includes 16 works that are based on the dreamlike environments, which have become a recurrent theme in the works of Lisa D Manner. To confront these images is to experience a world that is breathtakingly beautiful, unpredictable and dense of fateful emotions.
There are a precision and a presence in these paintings that immediately appear. The motives unfold in magnificent environmental formations where dream and reality merge. While letting the eye drift around in the image one soon discovers an amazing amount of details, contrasts and unexpected encounters. Through shadows, light and architectural remnants an inner space is constructed that both seem infinite and surrounded by an inner flowing system. In some of the paintings, the architecture provides a framework and structure as a skeleton of classical monuments and spatiality, while nature, shadows and light dominate in others. Particularly paintings in the smaller format vibrate of heat and a golden shimmering light that one only can experience a hot afternoon when the sun is slowly sinking. The environments seem both familiar and unfamiliar, nearby and distant.
In some of the larger paintings, as in the works such as Interiors and Outskirts, there is also a darkness that creates a vision of a future that is both chaotic and disintegrating. We see remains of a city where buildings and environments have started tumbling down. In the painting Outskirts a spider-like web of tunnels, sites and structures appear against a dark background. It is as if standing at the outer edge of an external border, and turning the gaze straight into an open shaft. The painting exudes a sense of freedom and destruction, a multilayered urban space where many stories are hidden in layers. Cities are built up, expand and alter. This on going process fulfills dreams and arouse euphoria, but it also creates anxiety and fear, depending on who we are and our history. The paintings of Lisa D Manner are a collage of both physical and mental images of all that is included in the city landscape: desire, beauty and the adventure of existence, but also of fragility and vulnerability.
Lisa D Mannerheim was born in 1979 and graduated from Umeå Art Academy in 2007. She lives and works in Malmö. Her work is represented in public as well as private collections. She has exhibited, among other places, at Peter Bergman Galleri in Stockholm, Galleri Magnus Åklundh in Malmö, Kristianstad Konstmuseum, 2013, Volta, New York, 2015 and received scholarships received Ellen Trotzigs fund, Malmo Museum and Arts Grants Committee Grant.
