In a series of paintings by Susanna Antonsson, floral motifs move across dark, minimal backgrounds. Familiar and everyday objects and spaces are stylized and distinguished by subtle shifts. Clues to personal mysteries gesture toward something inexplicable and wordless. In “Låt det dö,” the flower becomes a kind of revenant—returning each year as a reminder of something. It’s as if the season’s first imported tulips, the coltsfoot emerging from the soil, and the daffodils in the garden are trying to speak. But why is it so hard to hear them?
Flowers have always been part of our lives—as language, decoration, companionship, triviality, and as symbols of both impermanence and renewal. But in a culture dominated by data and information, symbolism no longer carries the same weight. The images and metaphors that once created meaning and connection, that stabilizes life, disappears in a symbolic void. Language and the world become demystified. As a painter, Antonsson returns to questions of how our relationship to the world is shaped by this shift, and how images are formed within the attention economy we live in—how, more and more, we watch ourselves looking, rather than seeing directly.
Both as a method and image, the paintings become tools for examining perception, resonance, and attention as phenomena. The small scale becomes a way of working in close proximity. Alongside the simplification of her motifs, Antonsson creates a limited focal point the viewer must approach in order to see. Through consistent repetition and a return to the same imagery, she attempts to make space for a kind of simplicity. In repetition lies the hope of hearing something within what seems modest and unremarkable.
Susanna Antonsson (b. 1991, Linköping) lives and works in Bergen. She has previously exhibited at Kristiansand Kunsthall (Kristiansand), LNM (Oslo), Hordaland Kunstsenter, Galleri Knipsu (Bergen), and Not Quite (Fengersfors). “Låt det dö” is her first solo exhibition in Sweden.