Svedberg often caricatured well-known politicians, and concentrated on the world’s oppressed in her dark images. A row of black men stand naked against a wall, arms upraised, in Painting 7 (c.1970). Streaks of red paint hint at bloodshed. The image has been doubled twice on the same canvas. In the lower picture, a shapeless stain spreads like a map, or a pool of blood, or a human organ. To the left are three shrunken bodies in the same position as the others. The original that Svedberg worked from was a contemporary photo by Ernest Cole, showing a medical examination of miners in apartheid South Africa. With her reworking of the image, Svedberg has created an even more urgent picture of human degradation.
Kristoffer Arvidsson from The Collection Gothenburg Museum of Art, Gothenburg 2014
