wellness
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
Blickstilla (Perfectly still), paper size 57x43cm, edition 6, SEK5000
Välkomst (Welcoming), paper size 49x53cm, edition 3, SEK5000
Rum för trivsel (Room for well-being), paper size 65x39cm, edition 6, SEK5000
På kanten (On the edge), paper size 47x50cm, edition 4, SEK5000
Höga förväntningar (High expectations), paper size 46x40cm, edition 5, SEK4500
Förväntansfull församling (Expectant congregation), paper size 71x53cm, edition 3, SEK5600