Emma Hartman: Closer

Swedish artist Emma Hartman paints soft, evocative inner landscapes, bathed in intense, luminous hues. Translucent layers of oil paint resemble watercolour, converging and overlapping to suggest gently rolling terrain. Her abstract works create harmonious, familiar-seeming spaces of refuge that envelop the viewer in a reassuring embrace. Her landscapes emerge from associations and from a dialogue between inner and outer worlds, with colour asserting itself as both subject and sensation.

For Hartman, colour is always at the heart of her process. She can never anticipate the final result; instead, the colours themselves drive the work forward. She begins by experimenting with a new combination of hues, guided by an inner image and an intuitive sense of how the colours feel as they come together. Colour gives the work its meaning, from its beginning to its end. One colour leads to another, carrying with it an emotional charge, a memory, or an association. Ultimately, colour takes shape as landscape.

Even as a child, Hartman was drawn to colour, and as an adult, she chose to continue inhabiting its world. In her paintings, Hartman explores how different hues, and the ways in which they are combined, can create both atmosphere and tension. Colour has the power to evoke emotions, suggest associations, and produce physical sensations. A balance – or imbalance – between colours generates an inner movement within the painting.

Emma Hartman (b. 1974) graduated from the Umeå Academy of Fine Arts in 2005. She has held numerous solo and group exhibitions in Sweden, including at Norrtälje Konsthall and Bonniers Konsthall. Her work is held in collections including those of the Norrköping Art Museum and Örebro County Museum.

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