Biografy outline

The writer, poet and painter Liv Odin has a Swedish-Irish family, was born in Italy and loves to consider herself as a citizen of the world. Since her childhood she devoted herself to painting and poetry, with particular fondness for Marc Chagall and James Joyce. When attending university, she fells in love with the works by Bruno Schulz and Tadeusz Różewicz.
Very interested in theatre as well, she’s influenced by the legendary Tadeusz Kantor. Extremely keen on different kind of music and motorbiking as well, she plays as rythmic guitarist with a few bands and goes riding by motorcycle through Europe, where she attends the so called alternative and underground art world.
She organizes her exhibitions with other street artists, in campings and in small cultural centres and plays again with a new group, but the band is split by strong internal disputes just before the first recording. She starts again her university studies and keeps on taking around her exhibitions during the holidays. Meanwhile her verses and tales are published on some magazines.
The artist gives also birth to a few works for children, as the short poem “Spring in town” and the works of poetry and prose Sales dreams, No snow under the bridge, Last row. Quite a lot of her works are dedicated to Sweden and Irland.
On the road of her motorbike-travelling exhibitions, she’s often in Paris, city which she doesn’t feel particularly attracted to until the stroke of lightning at the end of the ‘90s.
During a stay of a few weeks in the French capital, the artist discovers the true Paris and falls in love with it. She lives in a small flat in the 4th arrondissment, near Place de la Bastille and the Marais, the whole of the so called Jewish and gay Quarters, where you can often meet her in Place des Vosges, while painting and writing verses.
She developes further all the works she created in 1984, The Small Scrolls, some times presented under the title The Rolled Up Poems, some part of which are dedicated to Parisian themes.
Her tie with Paris becomes so closer and closer that in short time she begins considering it as her adoptive town, ”her own” town. It’s to Paris that she decides to move definitely and to give birth to the small art-litterary salon in the tiny flat in rue Mornay, which starts being a meeting place for alternative artists coming from anywhere.
Gradually the salon seems going to become a real cultural centre and she begins looking for a bigger place. While being for a time in Italy, particular circumstances and events force her not to go back to France and to leave definitely her cultural salon-flat in Paris.
In the meanwhile she gathers a few verses written in different times. Many of them are inspired to experiences that have made her known the human wickedness, the extreme hypocrisy, disloyalty and false moralism hidden behind those that she calls dirty souls, that even more often they conceal their lack of soul: false souls, as the ones of plastic manikins.
Those works start the poetic-pictorial exhibions Plastic Souls. Some verses sound undoubtedly gothic, obscure, at times violent. The paintings that accompany them meet with particular success in the dark and gothic metal music world.
A year and a half after leaving Paris, the artist goes back there for a short stay. Nostalgia makes her paint several watercolours and small monothematic acrylic pictures that give birth to the exhibition Nostalgie de Paris, together with the verses “A spot on the ground at Sully-Morland”, very appreciated by Parisians and also by the cultured tourist that wish to get a different souvenir of a certain artistic value.
The Small Scrolls are made in different styles and forms, the simplest ones of them consisting of prints which some times serve as visiting cards of her original works. Small Scrolls in various versions accompany important events and meetings.
After the tragic facts of September 11th, 2001, when the world pays more attention to the Middle Eastern question, the artist creates the bike-travelling works Flowers in Palestine and Tears for Israel, including verses and paintings often accompanied to Arabian and Israeli music. These works deal with the theme of terrorism as well and express the firm hope the tormented lands of Middle East will be able to live in peace.
For some time a few other works dealing with Jewish themes see the light. Some of those verses and paintings are inserted into the interesting series of travelling exhibitions Never lived memories. Then, to close once and for all the Jewish cycle, the artist gives life to the novel Lonely Shabbat. Based on real facts, the novel is harshly criticized by some Jewish communities because of the polemic content towards Judaism.
Among the travelling exhibitions that besides painting and poetry include part of theatre performances, it’s surely to mention the mini opera The Barbarians, which for the moment being consists of two parts: one with an animalist background, while the latter touches the delicate subject of the “rainbow families”.
Both the works include some big acrylic paintings on cartoon with a text printed or projected on a screen or white walls. An apparently small work, a mini opera that becomes particularly striking when accompanied by the listening of the voices, live or recorded on cd, and by the manikin-puppets that remind the theatre work The dead class by Tadeusz Kantor.
The artist takes the mini opera around Europe, included Poland where she’s scholarship holder at Polonicum University in Warsaw in 2005.
The wind doesn’t remember includes paintings and verses of more intimist kind, some times soffused with melancholy, referring to family and memories, together with other works dedicated to the victims of unjustice. In them you can recognize the themes of the denied rights, discrimination and difficulties peculiar to whom is often considered nonconventional for different reasons that in most of cases are very questionable.
In Inventions there are some more explicit references to electronics and informatics that have revolutioned our way of living on the earth, together with several verses linked with different worlds and levels of existence.
Suicide and homicide are instead the main subjects that inspire the series of short tales collected under the title The cat in the kitchen. In this prose work the artist highlights that the impotence in front of unjustice often and often causes such a desperation that takes the victims to extremes, so that they frequently change, against their will, into unguilty persecutors. 

                                                                   ....Agnieszka Wilczyńszka

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