Maja Forslund- Akt

At art school in Paris Maja Forslund spent a lot time seated before croquis models, sketching their swiftly-moving poses every day for months. Those sessions have been the raw material of painters' careers for hundreds of years, teaching them to interpret and shape the human form, but when Forslund returned to the subject matter as a photographer, she broke new ground. The camera adds another dimension. Details that would be elided by the nature and speed of a sketch stick indelibly to her compositions, creating Surreal and often tragic portraits. Props seem to become the models' belongings--a pair of slippers, a fan and some spots of paint accrue meaning--and the circumstance of being naked in a crowd is revealed as bizarre. A man in the midst of easels and scattered stools recalls a survivor on a battlefield.

Maja Forsslund was born in Stockholm in 1975. She moved to Paris at the age of 19 and stayed there for ten years before graduating from ENSBA, The Academy of Fine Art in Paris in 2003. In 2001/2002 she studied at The Academy of Fine Art in Kraków. Whilst studying she worked as a set designer and mural painter.