Sketches for a Painting

Cecilia Edefalk often paints with photographs in mind. Just as often, she converts her paintings back into photographs, capturing details of her canvases—themselves repainted many times over—with shifts in cropping or the method of display. The painting captured here was itself based on a photograph: a film still for the Laurel and Hardy silent movie Wrong Again (1929). One question that underpins Edefalk’s work is how representation, understood as depiction but also as “presenting again,” affects the meaning of works that are neither originals nor copies.