STATEMENT

For me art is not about depicting, it is about making visible. To make visible different aspects of our inner, for example our male and female sides, our intellectual, emotional and spiritual sides.

I can be inspired by something I have experienced. I remember a special sound, light, colour, smell, movement, but I do not try to depict it. I just intuitively put paint on the canvas in many thin layers, letting motifs appear out of the chaos, change, be reinforced or painted over again and again, letting the painting gradually transform. Sometimes the motifs are abstract; sometimes they are nature or different kind of portraits.

I want to take the viewer on a visual journey. To let the viewer catch a glimpse of different aspects of himself, of the illusions of life. Art and life are one.

ABOUT ME

I was born in 1947 in Stockholm, Sweden. Art in different forms and photography has intrigued me since my teens and I often visited different exhibitions. I chose not to pursue the art studies I'd been given the opportunity to attend, but art has always followed me through. During many years I was practising as a psychologist, but had to stop working in 1995 due to the consequences of a car crash.
During the following years thereafter my life changed fundamentally in every respect and I made a completely new start.

As an artist, I am mainly an autodidact and have studied painting for different artists and in shorter programs of artistic education in Sweden and USA. Since 2001, I go each summer to a residency for artists in southern Öland to paint under the guidance of different artists, mostly the painter Curt Källman. In May 2008 I studied art at Vermont Studio Center in USA, on their artist residency program – painting, under the guidance of the painter Peter Acheson and the sculptor/painter/photographer Grace Knowlton.

I am painting in acrylic on canvas but am also making paintings using mixed media. In my work I often use sand collected from many different parts of the world. On each painting where I use sand I let the sand from different parts of the world blend together – blending their different textures.

In September 2003 I was hit with cancer. During the tough treatments, when the body couldn't take anymore and I was hovering on the thin line between life and death, something new opened up inside me, which took me to a place of absolute stillness beyond space or time. I return to this place within me when I need to rest, catch up and rediscover myself, but also to come into contact with the source of creativity and creating, with life itself.

Now I finally get an outlet for my inner hunger to create, at the same time as painting is a road to inner development. To be allowed to create without preconceptions and not be frozen by demands of achieving gives an enormous joy in the process of creating itself. When I put the brush to the canvas I can hardly stop painting.

REVIEW

Prof. GIAN LUIGI GUARNERI (2008):
(Translated from Italien by Andreas Björklund)

"The abstract expressionism of Anita Elgerot is moving towards timeless dimensions, where fragments of matter become faces, deprived of a really true correspondence, but emerging from the depth of the unconscious.

Ectoplasms, as soon as they have been defined, move in a space coded in an almost imperceptible way, creating multiple of individuals from an almost emptied soul. Chromatic flashes emerge on the canvas, trying to brake loose from it, trying to recapture its original order, to connect to an archaic formal order. The colours liberate themselves from the forms and expand towards new creative ways, from an uncontrollable effect. The acrylics and the painted sculptures manifest a deep investigation in unexplored horizons, from where a sensitive poetry emerges".