wellness

10 January 2022

The exclusive spa facility exudes enthusiastic idealism and is filled with individuals with holistic needs. This is the place for health utopia, creating a promise of success and personal well-being through bodily control and self-discipline. It is at once alluring and grotesque.

Good health is synonymous with beauty and self-realization. At the same time, it locks us in with the feeling of personal inadequacy; loneliness and insecurity flourish in the pursuit of the good life and self-optimization.

The wellness series consists of multicolored copper prints with the spa facility as a motif. The empty, overwhelming spaces of the images are lifeless, but waiting, as if something is about to happen. The forward and upward striving architecture help creating the feeling of a trembling stillness, at the same time utopianly dreamy and dystopically threatening.

The melancholy and passivity in the images is both alienating and expectant - a mixture of fear, doubt and hope. They are frozen in the transition from one state to another - a limbo land of lonely corridors, frightening stairs and an identityless crowd waiting for an unspoken redemption.

Malou da Cunha Bang has created the works through a time-consuming method that is very unusual in printmaking. For each artwork, she has created four almost identical images on a corresponding number of copper plates. After that, the plates have been inked in black, red, yellow and blue, printed on top of each other, creating a four-color image.

The works are made in small editions of between 3 and 6 prints. They will be released for sale at ed-art.se on Sunday 16 January

Vila (Rest), paper size 57x43cm, edition 4, SEK5000