Walls of flesh, walls of skin. I meet this at Galleri Larsen/ Warner, where I am overwhelmed by Marta Edelheit's paintings from the 1960s and 70s. Edelheit has lived in Sweden since the 1990s, but during the previously mentioned decades she was in the middle of the action, in New York's avant-garde art scene, in the city where she herself was born and worked for many years. Works from this period are now displayed in two small gallery rooms on bstermalm in what is Edelheit's first exhibition in Stockholm in a couple of decades. Sometimes her naked bodies are close, completely enlarged in a way that almost obscures what you look at: from the lines of the small pastel drawings, zoomed in almost abstraction, you can read the volume of a thigh, the folds of the vulva, the roundness of the buttocks. The color scale is strong, you could call it psychedelic, but I prefer to call it fruity: together with the more skin-friendly tones of peach, blushing inside, blue and green and yellow are found. A milky pink nipple is paired with the colors of an overripe banana. Edelheit's color management is phenomenal. In the drawings, it appears to be both inviting, tempting and a little repulsive.
Eyes that are sometimes closed, like closed in a sweet intoxication, sometimes turned away, sometimes angled straight towards the viewer. It is only when elements of voyeurism affect one. As in A View of Lake A titian (1973) where the nickel-yellow woman in the armchair locks her eyes in one. In the other paintings, the painted ones are rather enclosed in themselves. In the kaleidoscope -linking form where the same person reappears at different angles on the same painting, a dreamlike dimension is added to these enchanted portraits.