Market Art Fair: Isabella Ducrot, Kyungseo Lee, Astrid Kajsa Nylander, Elsa Thoresen

Isabella Ducrot (b. 1931 in Naples, Italy) lives and works in Rome, Italy. Ducrot is known for her devoted use of woven cloth as the founding material of her artistic practice. Only beginning her artistic career later in life, the Italian artist has assembled a sublime collection of antique textiles through her extensive travels through Asia, originating primarily from Turkey, India, China, Tibet and Afghanistan. Her practice combines works on paper and vintage fabric and she often works in very large scales. 

Kyungseo Lee (b. 1995 in Seoul, South Korea) is an artist based in London. Within her practice, Kyungseo Lee explores the conflicting emotions and values towards the human experience. The erotically charged images serve as a stressor to the viewer, challenging one’s own ambivalence on the topic of ‘body image’. The figures in Kyungseo Lee’s paintings morph into abstraction from form to expression which additionally serve as an opportunity for interpretation from different perspectives.

Astrid Kajsa Nylander (b. 1989 in Gothenburg, Sweden) lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden. Nylander studied at Hochschule für Bildende Künste Hamburg and graduated with an MFA in 2018. Nylander creates colorful and playful paintings, often in shaped canvases and neon colors. Her ongoing series “minijobs” are small paintings in geometric or floral shapes, depicting a memory of buttons. The series function as fierce bursts of ideas, adding to a bigger body of work altogether where nostalgia, dark humor and vibrant pops of color meet. Nylander is represented in the collection of Moderna Museet in Stockholm.

Elsa Cecilie Thoresen (b. 1906 in Benson, Minnesota, USA. Died 1994 in Seattle, USA). Thoresen was a surrealist painter, who lived and worked in Norway, Denmark, Sweden and the US. She lived in Copenhagen between 1935 – 1944. Escaping the Nazi occupation of Denmark in 1944, Thoresen lived and worked in Stockholm and spent her summers in Halmstad. She moved back to the US in 1953. Thoresen’s work was shown at the important Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme in Paris in 1938, organized by surrealist theorist André Breton and possibly the movement's most important poet Paul Éluard.