Northern Glow of Desire: Lukas Göthman - Sofia Heinonen - Jesper Nyrén - Astrid Sylwan - Johan Wahlstrom

Lukas Göthman, born 1970 in Sweden, lives and work in Stockholm. Lukas Göthman celebrated work is represented in several collections and he has been exhibited in several different countries. Lukas artistry focuses on series of journeys, self experienced selected realities or made up by fiction and dreams. His works are often featured as texts; short stories, a title or a phrase repeated to create an abstract composition. Göthman investigates the visual effect of words and letters. Sentence by sentence build an intriguing visual composition set over a monocrome of colour. Curves and impressions of varying fields of depth are realised following a simple set of self imposed rules. Other series of works investigate the landscape, creating dreamlike illusions. It is the artist's very private world of thought or emotion in which viewers are immersed through the intensity of the colour scheme and expressive texts in his works.

Sofia Heinonen, born in 1987 in Sweden, lives and works in Stockholm. She graduated with an MFA in Fine Art from Konstfack, Stockholm (2022) and a BFA in Fine Art from the University of Bergen (2017). In 2023, she received the Martha Larsson Rome Scholarship, awarded jointly by the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and His Majesty the King of Sweden, with the following citation: "Painting meets our field of vision like a soft mist. The enigmatic play of colors evokes light that both moves before us and reflects on our bodies. The hand’s intervention on the surface’s topography testifies to the choreographic impulses of the creative process, while simultaneously disrupting the image’s dimensional limits. From the space in front of the canvas, we are invited to contemplate nature and our place on earth, with a sense of how time surrounds us through life."

Jesper Nyrén, born 1979 in Sala, Sweden, currently lives and works in Stockholm. He holds a MFA from the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm. Nyrén’s work has been exhibited extensively, primarily in Sweden and the Nordic countries and his work is represented in many institutions, museums and collections. He has made several large scale commissions for permanent public art works. Nyrén´s paintings investigates the physical and visual properties of painting and how they relate to memory, perception and temporality. Each painting is fundamentally based on an experience - of a landscape, or a certain light at a certain time and place. From this Nyrén creates condensed paintings of carefully worked surfaces that oscillate between abstraction and figuration, between what is determinate and indeterminate, direct and suggested. Between the painting as object and metaphor.

Astrid Sylwan, born 1970 in Antwerp, Belgium. Lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden. Astrid holds a MFA from Konstfack 2005 – University College of Arts, Craft and Design, Stockholm. The figurative very seldom enters Sylwan’s world, it is the colour that plays the main part. Not only colour as shade, but also as a physical presence. Sylwan uses all the physical characteristics of the colour when she applies it to the canvas with broad brushes, colour knives or scrapers, or pours it over the canvas in pools and lets it run across the surface in large drops. Astrid Sylwan has quickly taken a position as one of Sweden’s most prominent painters; including an ambitious exhibition schedule, been awarded several prestigious grants and her work can today be found in the collections of eg. Moderna museet, Statens konstråds and Malmö konstmuseum. She has created many major public commissions, including the new City Line in Stockholm & Stockholm Sjukhem.

Johan Wahlstrom, born 1959 in Stockholm, Sweden, Lives and works in NYC/US. Johans work focuses on the human condition and as a comment of the political landscape, and his work is represented in several museums and collections. “I see myself as a “post-post-modernist” playful painter of truth, exploring the psychological and spiritual toll of some of the most pressing social, economic, and political issues in our society. In our ever-accelerating media cycle, we process vast amounts of textual information daily, but often it is an iconic image that endures. My paintings explore both our emotional entanglements with current events and the space these images hold in how we collectively understand them. I draw my inspiration from my previous career in music, reflected in the use of layered density of color and composition. I work to keep a constant feeling of alienation in my paintings, which in tandem with my color palette connects to a long history of a gloomy and mysterious aesthetic from the Northern Hemisphere.”