Page 21 - recent works

bears witness of a courage and desire to penetrate the very foundation
of life. She portrays a chaotic interior and, for this reason, it does not seem
relevant to classify her work as marine- or landscape painting. She does not
share the marine painters’ striving to document minutely the movements of
the water and the play of light upon it. Consequently she never makes use of
preliminary sketches or photographs, instead the motifs are created directly
on the canvas.
Ann Frössén describes the method as an urge to defend the unique
image and a resistance to duplicate what has already been done or seen.
There are no echoes of post-modernist pretensions about art as palimpsest
or the recycling of earlier images in the way she relates to her work. There is
nothing here but a naked formulation of a state of crisis.

Childhood experiences played an important role in her becoming an artist
and it is no secret that the paintings of thundering seas and foaming
swells also fill a therapeutic need. Raised in an upper class home in the
wealthy Stockholm suburb of Djursholm she speaks of tensions in the
family, of an icy coldness and a feeling of alienation. Painting involved
very significant risks on the psychological level. “It was like throwing
oneself into freezing deep water.”
When she was small she was terrified of suddenly being thrown headfirst
down the stairs. In the early 1990s the motif of the stairs with hard, angular
and narrow steps is recurring in her paintings. The step from stairs to wave-
crests is not long and, at about the same time, she approached the most
threatening image of all: the precipice and the ocean.
A certain familiarity with the study of water during the 1980s had
been acquired by painting abstract visions of violent, looming skies in an
expressionist spirit. This was followed by works that were more true to reality
and by dramatic paintings of waterfalls in strongly contrasting tones of white
and dark green. At this time she was much concerned with a spiritual enquiry
that took her to Catholic circles in communist Warsaw and to a convent in
Naples. The paintings from this period are characterized by an ecstatic and
elevated vitality in which one can trace ideas about salvation and redemption.
Even if the religious quest has become less apparent in recent years; or,
more correctly, has been amalgamated into the work, her latest paintings
with their flashing, radiant white crests of waves seem to give a foretaste of an
explanatory light.
Ann Frössén paints herself into the present – a time that has done away
with ideologies, that has torn down the statues of ancient heroes and has

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