Edvarda Aslaksens Braanaas

Edvarda Aslaksen Braanaas ( b. 1963)

EDVARDA is a norwegian artist based in Oslo and Los Angeles. Edvarda started her career as an artist at Scuola Internazionale di Grafica, in Venice, Italy in the early 80’s. Later she achieved her MA degree from the National Academy of the Arts and a BA degree in Art History from the University of Oslo.

Since the beginning of the 1990s, Edvarda has had several separate and collective exhibitions in both Europe and the United States. She has been actively involved in the Los Angeles art scene since 2014. Edvarda shows her work in both established and less established multi-venue art spaces.

She is part of the wave of new ventures that continue to expand the boundaries of how art is experienced. In addition to her fine art work, Edvarda has worked on numerous projects at the intersection of art and illustration, literature, and digital surfaces.

As a figurative painter, and part of the cultural transition of the 80s, the postmodern art of the 80s and 90s had a profound impact on Edvarda’s approach to creativity, and her fascination with the distinctions between high art and low culture. In Los Angeles, a city that to such a remarkable degree consists of a patchwork of subjective and selective realities, and where the local culture seems to encourage a fluidity in terms of identity and artifice, she found the perfect canvas for her meditations on storytelling and beauty.

A recurring through-line in Edvarda’ art is the battle to regain the power of definition in terms of how women are depicted in pop culture, by painting women on their own terms. When we gaze at, and into, Edvarda’s women, they also gaze back. The moments captured in her art explore the fundamentals of what it means to see, and to be seen. Edvarda captures women in intimate, revealing moments of fear and courage, power and vulnerability, submission and faith, pain and surrender, devotion and trust. In this way, she celebrates female beauty with a neo-feminist twist. Her figurative paintings question sexuality, individuality, freedom of choice, and integration. Her art, often referred to as urban symphonies, is unabashedly futuristic and female-centric.

CV