Artists - Ditte Lauridsen

Evelina Hägglund

Evelina Hägglund (b. 1992, Stockholm) works between sculpture and large-scale drawing. Her practice centres on the body as a site of weight, resistance and translation — a place where internal states meet material conditions.
Working primarily with graphite on hessian, alongside plaster, metal and other structurally demanding materials, Hägglund approaches making as a sustained physical negotiation. The coarse weave of the hessian resists the hand; graphite is pressed repeatedly into its fibres, building density through friction and accumulation. Repetition is not a stylistic device but a method. Through insistence, the surface begins to carry weight.
Across her work, balance is never treated as a stable condition. Leaning structures, suspended gestures and densely worked planes suggest that equilibrium is temporary and continuously adjusted. Rather than representing experience, Hägglund’s works register it materially — through pressure, strain and duration.
Language plays a secondary role in her practice. Hägglund is particularly interested in states of wordlessness, where meaning is carried by posture, tension and embodied response rather than articulated through narrative. The body functions both as boundary and medium: it absorbs external forces while simultaneously generating internal pressure. Her works translate this condition into matter.
Educated at Goldsmiths, University of London (MFA, 2021), following studies at the Academy of Visual Arts in Ljubljana, Hägglund has developed an international practice spanning the UK, Scandinavia and Central Europe. Her work has been presented at institutions and galleries including Kunstraum Niederösterreich, Vienna; Parafin and Union Pacific, London; Saatchi Gallery, London; Golsa, Oslo; Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm; and other venues across Europe and the United States.
Alongside her exhibition practice, Hägglund has received grants and awards from the Swedish Arts Committee, the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts, the Goethe-Institut and the City of Stockholm. In 2021, she completed a public commission for Plaza Protocol, curated by Tjaša Pogačar in Ljubljana.
Hägglund lives and works in Stockholm.

Ilja Karilampi

Ilja Karilampi (*1983, Gothenburg, Sweden) is a contemporary artist whose practice spans sculpture, installation, digital works, and public art. His work draws from the visual languages of popular culture, music, internet aesthetics, and urban environments. Through sampling, collage, and symbolic abstraction, he reflects on how images, identities, and systems circulate in contemporary society.
Karilampi studied at Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main (2005–2010) and the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm (2008–2009). He has presented solo exhibitions internationally at institutions and galleries including MoMA PS1, New York; Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm; Erik Nordenhake Gallery, Stockholm; Temnikova & Kasela, Tallinn; Suzanne Geiss Company, New York; Wilkinson Gallery, London; and Sandy Brown, Berlin.
His work has also been included in major group exhibitions at venues such as Kiasma; Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; ZKM, Karlsruhe; Kunsthalle Zürich; Barbican, London; and Fondation Ricard, Paris, among others.
Alongside his exhibition practice, Karilampi has realized numerous public art commissions in Sweden, including works for Statens Konstråd, Stockholm Konst, and Göteborg Konst. Recent projects include FolkFigur (2022), a digital public artwork, and Gbg for life yeah (2026), a large-scale public commission at Nya Masthuggskajen, Gothenburg.
Karilampi's work is characterized by a fluid movement between physical and digital space, where high and low cultural references coexist. With humor, intensity, and sharp sensitivity to contemporary visual culture, his practice reflects the rhythms and contradictions of life shaped by technology, media, and collective experience.

Luciana Ame

Luciana Ame (b. 1958, Krakow, Poland) lives and works in Italy and Sweden. With a background in classical music from the Academy of Music in Krakow, she approaches image-making with the same sense of rhythm, tension, and disciplined clarity that shaped her early training.
Ame’s drawings and paintings unfold through precise, continuous contours in which figures appear and dissolve in the same movement. Operating between abstraction and representation, her compositions create a quiet psychological charge; bodies held in states of transition, gestures suspended, presence suggested rather than declared.
In recent works, Ame introduces a restrained palette that expands her monochrome vocabulary without altering the essential structure of her language. Color enters as a subtle displacement, a shift in temperature, deepening the emotional register of the line while maintaining its distilled purity.
Rooted in echoes of classical form yet unbound by narrative, Ame’s imagery moves with a musical sensibility: minimal, deliberate, and attuned to nuance. Her work invites a slow reading; a space where contour becomes rhythm, and stillness carries its own resonance.

Joakim Kocjancic

Joakim Kocjancic (b. 1975, Milan) is a photographer and artist based in Stockholm. He studied painting at the Academies of Fine Arts in Florence and Carrara, and later completed a Master’s degree in Photojournalism at the London College of Communication. Before moving to Sweden in 2006, he lived and worked in several European cities, experiences that continue to inform the way he understands space, proximity and human presence.
Kocjancic works exclusively with analogue black-and-white photography. His practice is grounded in physical presence and duration; the camera stays with a moment rather than captures it. Grain, contrast and blur arise from time in the world rather than stylization. The photographs are shaped by movement, breath and light — by what occurs before thought formulates it into meaning.
His photobook Europea (2021), a long-term portrait of everyday life across European cities, was awarded the Swedish Photo Book Prize. In 2024, Kocjancic received first prize in the Gomma Black & White Award, an international award focused on artistic black-and-white photography, organized by Gomma Books, a publisher known for exclusive, high-quality photobook editions and an artist-led, non-commercial approach.
Kocjancic has exhibited widely across Europe, and his work is represented in the collection of Moderna Museet in Stockholm, as well as in private collections internationally. He is currently developing two forthcoming books, Solvarv and Infiore, to be published by L’Artiere.

Bill Billekvist

Bille Billekvist (b. 1992, Stockholm). Lives and works in Oslo.
Bill Billekvist’s painting exists in the tension between control and release. At first glance, his works may seem chaotic – as if the brush has run wild – but beneath the surface lies a precise, deliberate structure. His process is grounded in the movement of the body and a close dialogue with materials, often transparent textiles such as ripstop or Voile.
Color, light, and structure function as building blocks rather than decoration. The canvas becomes bodily – a thin skin through which the stretcher frame subtly appears, turning the painting into a physical object as much as an image. His process is intuitive and meditative, akin to Tai Chi, where gesture and breath guide the composition.
Billekvist graduated from the Oslo Academy of Fine Arts in 2022 and has exhibited at Podium, Kösk, Hos Arne, and Coulisse Gallery.

Florine Imo

Florine Imo (b. 1995, Vienna) is a young Austrian artist rapidly gaining international recognition. Her practice spans painting, sculpture, and installation, creating immersive worlds filled with goddesses, celestial beings, and elemental forces. Exploring themes of femininity, spirituality, and the complexities of existence, her work blurs the line between the mythical and the earthly.
Imo has exhibited widely, with notable shows including Judgement Day (2023, Steve Turner Gallery, Los Angeles) and Light as a Feather (2024, LBF Contemporary, London) — both of which drew international critical attention. Most recently, her work appeared in the museum exhibition SUBSTANZ (2024–2025, Künstlerhaus Wien), further cementing her institutional significance and position as one of the most distinctive young voices in contemporary art.
She Ate marks Florine Imo’s first solo exhibition in Sweden.

Johan Barrett

Johan Barrett (b. 1983) is a Stockholm-based artist with Swedish and American roots. His work spans painting and sculpture, focusing on themes of longing, emotional collapse, and renewal.
Barrett’s paintings often depict dreamlike zones where melancholy meets desire, and everyday scenes are transformed into portals of introspection. His recent works feature recurring motifs such as palm trees, still lifes, and distant horizons—more as states of mind than literal places. Through a soft yet urgent visual language, he examines the emotional pull between memory, fantasy, and existential wanderlust.
He has exhibited in Sweden and internationally, with solo and group shows at institutions including Liljevalchs (Stockholm), Galleri Golsa (Oslo), and curated projects in London. He studied at Beckmans College of Design, Uppsala University, and Grafikskolan in Stockholm.

Jarl Ingvarsson

Jarl Ingvarsson (b. 1955, Asmara, Eritrea) is a Swedish painter based in Sparsör, Sweden, known for his bold, expressive style and distinctive artistic voice.
A graduate of the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm (1978–1983), Ingvarsson’s practice moves fluidly between abstraction and figurative expressionism. Drawing from personal experience, everyday objects, and cultural references, he frequently incorporates motifs such as stools, flowers, or comic book figures into his work. His paintings explore existential themes through a rich visual language shaped by jazz, progressive rock, and poetic reflection.
Ingvarsson has been widely exhibited in Sweden and is represented in major collections including Moderna Museet (Stockholm), Gothenburg Museum of Art, and Malmö Art Museum. He is a member of the Royal Academy of Art and was awarded the prestigious Prince Eugen Medal in 2018.

Axel Versteegh

Axel Versteegh (b. Sweden, 1989) lives and works in Stockholm. He graduated from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm in 2018 and also studied at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste in Dresden. His painting is rooted in the body’s materiality and its dissolution—an exploration of states rather than figuration. Versteegh often works in series where the paintings appear as fragments of something larger, where the resistance of color, the hesitation of the line, and memory effects bear traces of the human. His work moves between symbol and substance, between the transient and the unceasingly ongoing. In a time defined by clarity and pace, Versteegh’s works rest in ambiguity, in the unresolved and the bodily.
Versteegh’s painting places itself in a tradition of corporeally informed painting—where Anselm Kiefer’s earthy counterworlds, Per Kirkeby’s geological memory layers, and Gerhard Richter’s poetic destructions interact. There is also a kinship with postminimalism’s material intimacy, as well as with more recent figurative-gestural abstraction, shaped by experience. This is painting not in search of meaning—but rather, inviting us to feel.