Lydia Ericsson Wärn continually returns to her own reposed body. This repetition has become almost ritualistic – a continued effort to produce new outcomes while revisiting the same subject each time, an ongoing reckoning with the self. At Liste Art Fair Basel, each canvas presents an undefined space that holds a form, with figures suspended between presence and dissolution. Her paintings evolve reactively, allowing gesture and emotion to dictate outcome. Lydia often refers to the recurring figure as ‘scaffolding’ – an immovable presence that is alternately absorbed into or born from surrounding swathes of colour.

In Reposition and Yellow Brown Repose, doubled bodies converge and dissolve into one another through varying levels of abstraction. Ophelia extends this enquiry through the depiction of a landscape emptied of its central figure. Referencing Millais' wooded riverbank, the painting withholds Ophelia's image and instead implies the body through its absence. As the reclining figures elsewhere begin to resemble topography, the landscape in Ophelia takes on a bodily presence of its own, filling in the spatial blanks left by the surrounding works. For Lydia, painting is fertile ground for renegotiating possibilities and restraints. In this suspended space, the self is not fixed but continually reconstituted.