Artist: Anna Camner
Exhibition title: Places to Be
Venue: LOYAL, Stockholm, Sweden
Date: October 3 – November 2, 2024
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and LOYAL, Stockholm
LOYAL is proud to present Places to Be, Anna Camner’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. This new body of oil paintings, rendered in pale blues, pinks, and lavender tones, uncovers a universe of surrealist sensibilities, depicting details of the exterior that reach into inner desire. A tension between loose and tight, thick and thin, lives within each frame. From a technical perspective, Camner paints alla prima, wet-on-wet, in oil paint, balancing careful planning of each painted segment with an instinctual immediacy she has refined over the past twenty years. Places to Be is exhibited throughout both floors at the gallery. Her work was most recently presented at Liljevalchs in Stockholm Cosmology, the major presentation of Stockholm’s globalized art scene.
The title Places to Be suggests destinations that someone needs or wants to visit, conjuring a sense of movement or journey. It also implies desired states of being, mental planes pulling on the psyche. The exhibition inhabits a state of symmetry between physical and mental dimensions. Before Camner paints images, they reside in her mind, where she perfects the image, planning it out completely before she begins to paint and brings them out into the physical sphere. In this way, each painting serves as a bridge between the mental and the physical, uniting thought and form.
The dual role of touch as both receiver and emitter is vital to intimacy and connection, emphasizing how touch is a mutual experience—one cannot touch without also being touched in return. In Places to Be, the opaque “cocoons”, or protective casings inhabiting Camner’s paintings, appear impenetrable, yet not only allow physical sensation to pass through but also amplify and internalize it.
Camner’s calm, realistic aesthetic, governed by a general feeling of introspection and a focus on details, has a distinctive painterly practice that lies at the gentle intersection between figuration and abstraction. Underlying her entire oeuvre is a desire to free oneself, allowing the subconscious priority in decision-making.
Ultimately, the glossy membranes function as an intensified skin, offering a heightened sense of tactile perception. Malleable, loose-fitting layers, in direct contact with the skin, touch whatever the wearer touches and highlight both gestures and actions. Draped shrouds both restrain and enhance the expressive power of connection, while veiling superficial aspects of the self. These paintings hold an inner desire, a life force breaking out of its encasement, seeking a state of equilibrium of consciousness and bodily-being.
Anna Camner (b. 1977, Stockholm, Sweden) lives and works in Stockholm. Camner holds an MFA from the Royal Institute of Art (Stockholm). Solo exhibitions include Wetterling Gallery (Stockholm), Galerie Forsblom (Stockholm), Christian Larsen (Stockholm), Stellan Holm (New York), Faggionato (London) and Natalia Goldin (Stockholm). Her work has been presented institutionally at Liljevalchs (Stockholm), Magasin III (Stockholm), Färgfabriken (Stockholm), Örebro Konsthall (Örebro), The International Biennial of Contemporary Art (Cartagena) and at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art and Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery. Camner’s work is in the collections of UBS (Stockholm), Magasin III (Stockholm), Malmö Konstmuseum, Public Art Agency (Stockholm) and Wanås Konst (Knislinge). In 2022, Camner and her partner Mattias founded the art collective Black Iris, a platform for exhibitions in unexpected locations. She has an upcoming solo exhibition with the Ståhl Collection (Norrköping) in 2025.
