LARS EMBÄCK IS A SWEDISH ARTIST WORKING WITH INSTALLATIONS, DRAWING, PHOTOGRAPHY AND WRITING. Born 1955, Gothenburg, Sweden. Lives and works in Malmö.

Excerpt from the catalogue to In the City Grows a Field at Malmö konsthall 2022

Emily Fahlén, Asrin Haidari, Elena Tzotzi och Mats Stjernstedt

The artist recalls. "The motifs in these drawings emerged spontaneously. In retrospect, they can be seen as a way of describing the shift between different worlds – how we go from one state to another, like when we leave childhood behind and step into an unknown adult world. At the same time, we're transitioning between these different worlds, we remain confined within our own inner realm of sensations that both hinder our progress and help us move forward from one place to another. This picture encompasses a will to observe and analyse oneself as a foreign object. Who was I? Who am I now?"

Since the late-1990s, Lars Embäck has been working with a personal narrative in which the experience of childhood's vulnerability and traumas are given expression in art. In his staging of psychological states, realistic depictions and documentary fragments meet collective dream material. Scenes recur in new takes and from new perspectives, charged with subjective symbols such as the figure with its back to us, the two-sided head and the continual subversion of inner and outer reality.

Excerpt from the catalogue to Home at Malmö Konstmuseum 2022 by Malin Forssell

A child in a home withour safety is in a state of absolute vulnerability. A dysfunctional home often closes in on itself to prevent outsiders from seeing in. In his work as an artist, Lars Embäck return to his childhood. He deals with his personal history from socialogical as well as psychological perspectives. He work through events and tells about his complicated relationship to his parents. In the work Sleepwalker (2017), he presents an installation made up of a hat rack mounted high up on a wall with rope and clothing hanging from the hooks. Usually we find overcoats and other things we associate with an entrance hall hanging on a hat rack. Here it is instead a place for stressful and life-threatening situations that signa what might happen in the home.

Excerpt from the afterword to Family Life (2020) by William Crona

This is one of the terrible insights of Embäck’s narrative in Family Life: that by losing their memories after their respective traffic accidents, father and mother have also therefore lost their identities. In Family Life, as in the series of exhibitions leading up to it, it is precisely to the past that Embäck turns in an attempt to find or perhaps forge the self. Embäck, the man and the artist, searches for the past subjectively – as it appears in his memory – and objectively – as it stares out at him from doctor’s reports, photographs and newspaper clippings. As Embäck himself said of the Folie à Deux exhibition: »In the working process you gain access to situations that look foreign and impersonal even to yourself.« The past, or a version of it, is then re-created in the present as artwork so that past and present, public and private are complexly merged together. What Embäck said in a 1989 article about the viewer and the artwork resonates equally well with his own backward-gaze in Family Life: »The adventure begins and ends in a delimited space at one particular time. And the mystery that arises opens itself like a flash of lightning – a borderline event we come upon in the distance between the tangible and the insecure.« In Family Life, remembered events out of the family past are interposed and juxtaposed with objective documents that inform the artist’s understanding and interpretation of his memories, and by necessity, of himself. This is the truth, inside and out.