What drives Cilla Ericson’s artistry is the aha experience of seeing and depicting one’s immediate surroundings. In the exhibition Retro Aktiv, Ericson starts from themes that all take their point of departure in the present . Together they tell a story about the world and us humans.
Ericson has for several years been interested in the life of the oaks. In several different Stump Portraits, which began with Tv-eken in 2011, she shows her research into how cold and increasingly warmer winters create patterns in the annual rings of trees. In Night Paintings , starting in the 1990s, she painted night after night the view towards Blackeberg during the phases of the moon. After the 2005 tsunami, she ended the series.
Beginning in the 1980s, Ericson also painted fruits, vegetables and cross-sections of them in fascination with the brain’s ability to find context.
In 1986, Ericson exhibited Lövsånger at the Mälargalleriet. It consists of a series of paintings of leaves and trees along with poems. On the occasion of the Chernobyl disaster in the same year, Ericson and some artists, including Peter Tucker who coordinated the whole thing, staged a multimedia experiment. Slides were projected onto curtains with live music by Tomas Mera Gartz and Anita Livstrand, along with recorded nature sounds and poems during the performances at Kilen in Kulturhuset, Stockholm. Cilla Ericson underlines that: “The present is the miracle”. In autumn 2023, Gidlund’s publishing house will publish Lövsånger with Ericson’s pictures and poems.
At the beginning of his artistry, Ericson worked mainly in pencil and graphite. Fader Vår , in 1969 she and Hanns Karlewski signed together. The work reproduces twelve representations of the world’s injustices in relation to the Christian prayer. Ericson’s work always has sharpness. When she exhibited Black Images separately at the Collective Gallery in Stockholm in 1973, her work was subjected to damage in frustration with what these images showed.
Klarälven. Landscape in three acts 1975-1977, five large drawings in pencil, Ericson prepared as a traveling exhibition for National Exhibitions distributed by the Älvräddarna.
The room “Roots, Myths, Memories” was put together by Cilla Ericson together with Kerstin Abram-Nilsson for the exhibition We work for life, at Liljevalch’s art gallery in 1980. Here the iron sculpture The Spiral and small sculptures of loving couples, birthing goddesses and women were displayed .
The largest painting in the exhibition at the Art Academy is the Tower of Babel , 1979. It is a painting of the Court Brigade (Ulf Rahmberg, Stefan Teleman, Cilla Ericson, Julie Leonardsson and Ingrid Olsson). It was added in a happening when the Hofbrigaden painted over his previous painting The Emperor’s New Clothes. The Tower of Babel was a reaction to Stockholm Lokaltrafik’s decision not to put up the Moderna Museet’s poster for the exhibition “Brigadmåleri 1978. After 40 years at Luleå University of Technology, the painting is now coming back to Stockholm.
With sharp observation skills, Cilla Ericson shows us the worlds we live in. Through her pictures, we are reminded of who we are and what we do. Her stories are as relevant today as when they were first told.
