NEW YORK: Salander-O’Reilly Galleries is pleased to present its first exhibition of watercolors by Karin Oldfelt Hjertonsson. Please join us for an opening reception, Thursday September 6th from 5-7 pm. A number of her watercolors will be shown in our garden level galleries.

Karin Oldfelt Hjertonsson, a New Yorker since 2006, has had the rare privilege of traveling far and wide. The artist’s distinguished career as a diplomat includes a tour of duty as Sweden’s Ambassador to Cuba. It was during those years in Havana that her artistic endeavors started to gain recognition. Working with lithographs, woodcuts and silkscreens she made various themes from Cuban nature and wildlife her own. In 1994, these works earned the artist an exhibition at the Museum of Natural History in Stockholm, In Chile, Hjertonsson leant her skill at woodcuts to illustrate a book of poems by Pablo Neruda. She dedicated the last few years of her artistic career to working in watercolor while living in Finland, The clouds, flowers and landscapes she gains such inspiration from were published in a Finnish book entitled Flowers written by Berndt Arell, the director of the Museum of Modern Art in Helsinki. Hjertonsson has exhibited extensively in galleries and museums throughout Sweden and Finland. This is her first show in the United States.

These new watercolors, like her published works, tend towards the abstract; always taking inspiration from nature, in the form of clouds, flowers and landscapes. She is the co-author of a book due out in Stockholm this fall on a Swedish botanist’s work. Like Hjertonsson, this botanist worked throughout the Caribbean, albeit in the early part of the 20th Century. The book includes reproductions of watercolors and graphic works on various botanical species from the region that Hjertonsson knows so well.