Marie-Louise Ekman
Artist, director and principal.
Marie-Louise Ekman makes playful, absurd and feminist paintings, films and theatre. She has been principal of the Royal Institute of Art and head of the Royal Dramatic Theatre.
Marie-Louise Ekman was born in 1944 in Stockholm, with the surname De Geer. She studied at Konstfack and then at the Royal Institute of Art in the 1960s. Early on she found a voice of her own: a deliberately naive, playful style reminiscent of children’s drawings, comics and Pop Art.
Her paintings from the late 1960s and the 1970s often show women in everyday situations that suddenly turn absurd. The home, love, the family and the body are recurring themes. The humour is often black, and behind the cute surface lies a sharp critique of gender roles and bourgeois ideals. She is regarded as one of the most important feminist artists in Sweden.
Ekman has also worked in film and theatre. In the 1970s she made feature films such as Hallo Baby of 1976 and Mamma Pappa Barn of 1977, with the same mix of everyday realism, satire and dream as in her painting. Later she wrote and directed several stage productions.
She has also held major leadership posts. She was a professor and then principal of the Royal Institute of Art in the 1990s and 2000s, and from 2009 to 2014 she was head of the Royal Dramatic Theatre. It was unusual for a visual artist to lead the national stage, and her time there attracted both attention and debate. She was married to the actor Gösta Ekman until his death in 2017.
Marie-Louise Ekman has had major retrospectives, and her work is held by Moderna Museet, among others. She has meant a great deal to younger artists, especially women, by showing that humour and the seemingly simple can carry serious questions.