Annette von Malmborg — Contemporary Swedish painter in Paris, 2004 canvases
Ten canvases, held privately for twenty years.
Double portrait. Two visages surface side by side from a plaster wall, twin apparitions in sienna and bone, laced with a low breath of genuine gold.
Collection note/Every canvas in this cycle is worked in oil with genuine gold pigment, ground and laid by hand. One work is currently available for acquisition; a second may be approached by enquiry. The remaining canvases are held in private collection. For provenance, shipping, or private viewings, please write to the agent below.
Annette von Malmborg
Born in Uppsala in May 1969, Annette von Malmborg descends from an old Swedish family of draughtsmen and painters that traces its name to Otto von Malmborg. She studied painting in London and Paris, and has lived and worked in Paris since 1993.
Her practice is that of an abstract portraitist: the face as a field of colour, memory and temperament rather than likeness. She moves between the structural freedom of Picasso and the urgent, liquid brushwork of Van Gogh, letting a sitter dissolve into pigment and reappear as mood. She works slowly and old-school, in oil. Every colour is ground and mixed by hand; nothing is squeezed from a ready-made tube. Across the whole 2004 cycle the gold is genuine gold pigment, ground and laid into the paint by hand, never a metallic substitute.
By the turn of the millennium she was a woman moving between Paris and London on the current of that era: its music, its magazines, its late nights. Her former husband, an artist manager at Warner, opened a door onto the culture of the moment, and much of what enters these canvases arrives from those years, the faces, the tempo, the glamour held just off-frame. Two children, born in the late nineties, kept her life rooted even as the city hummed around her.
The ten canvases gathered here were painted in 2004 and held privately for more than two decades. This is their first public viewing.