The starting point is often an idea set in motion through a water-based painting process. As the paint moves across the paper, the work gradually shifts direction, and the artist responds to the new form that takes shape.

The paintings are built up layer upon layer, with thin applications of paint added over time. The water is rarely changed, and pigments from previous works carry over into new paintings. Often, each layer represents a single day — a distinct phase — so that every new layer emerges in response to the one before it, rather than following an original plan. The layers function as carriers of time — almost archaeological, though without uncovering anything hidden. Instead, the image is gradually constructed, and traces of earlier works remain present within the material.

The forms that emerge are partly planned, yet largely intuitive. A plan may be necessary to begin, but it is often set aside as the process develops its own language. Chance plays a decisive role, and Tandrevold Eriksen describes the work as a continuous response to the artwork itself.

In meeting the audience, Tandrevold Eriksen seeks to guide interpretation as little as possible. The works are open and abstract, inviting the viewer into a self-contained visual universe. Abstraction, unresolved emotions, and not fully knowing what a work will become are central driving forces in her practice. The element of surprise — also for the artist herself — is an essential part of the process.

Liv Tandrevold Eriksen (b. 1976, Oslo) is educated from the KHIO Institute of colour in Oslo.

Perhaps the greatest asset in Tandrevold Eriksen’s arsenal of resources is her exquisite lightness of touch. Her earlier paintings were delicate networks of thinly laid brushstrokes, evoking oily smudge patterns left on well used touchscreens. Since then, the quality of lightness has taken many forms in Eriksen’s images, in strangely atmospheric compositions where visual equilibrium is countered and attained by superimposition and layering. Some of her paintings introduces more physical elements to her layering process. The images are fairly large canvases occupied by amorphous blobs of diluted acrylics onto which fan-like constellations of similarly treated cutouts are attached to the support, either distributed as singularly applied patches or laid out in curvilinear sequences. These hybrid images notably depart from Eriksen’s previous works, inasmuch as the ground’s whiteness is less prominent and the sewn-on patches make for surfaces more textural and cluttered—however, curiously, without shedding the impression of lightness.

Where the graphic qualities of Eriksen’s earlier paintings tended to reveal her artistic background in drawing, the spaces conjured by her new images appear increasingly ambiguous. The multicoloured attachments look perfectly at home on the paintings’ surfaces, yet seem to hover weightlessly over the pictorial ground, like fluttering confetti. This effect of spatial oscillation—resulting from the appliquéd elements being, quite literally, cut from the same cloth as the rest of the composition whilst remaining materially distinct from it—is an eccentric take on the postmodern pictorial idiom which tilts the horizontal planes of illusionistic recession vertically.

Tandrevold Eriksen is in numerous private collections as well as Statens Kunstråd (SE), Norwegian Culture Council (NO), Fidelity Art Collection (US), Equinor Art Programme (NO), the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (NO) and KLP (NO).