Johan Barrett
- Johan Barrett (b. 1983) is a Stockholm-based artist with both American and Swedish roots. In recent years, he has emerged as a singular voice in contemporary painting, exploring what it means to be present — or to escape presence altogether.
- Barrett’s work draws from a deeply personal terrain, where melancholy meets longing and the mundane is recast as a portal to elsewhere. His recent paintings, populated by palm trees, still lifes and distant horizons, are not so much depictions of places as they are states of mind — dreamlike zones suspended between memory, fantasy, and desire.
- Working across painting and sculpture, Barrett circles themes of romantic love, emotional collapse and the search for renewal. In his exhibition ”HORSES and DIVORCES”, he embraces contradiction as form: between break-up and beginning, departure and arrival, the pain of the now and the glittering pull of the what-if. There’s a softness in his imagery — hands holding cigarettes, lovers in limbo — but also a pulse of urgency, a kind of existential wanderlust.
- Barrett has exhibited across Sweden and internationally, including solo and group shows at Liljevalchs, Galleri Golsa (Oslo), and curated exhibitions in London. Educated at Beckmans College of Design, Uppsala University and Grafikskolan in Stockholm, he continues to develop a painterly language that is both intimate and expansive — rooted in personal experience yet open to collective resonance.
Jarl Ingvarsson
- Born in Asmara, Eritrea, 1955
- Lives and works in Sparsör, Sweden
- Jarl Ingvarsson is a Swedish painter whose bold and expressive style has earned him widespread recognition. Raised in Sweden, he studied at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm from 1978 to 1983, where he laid the foundation for his distinctive artistic voice. Throughout his career, Ingvarsson has continually embraced new creative directions, producing work that is both innovative and unmistakably his own.
- Ingvarsson’s art navigates a fluid space between abstraction and figurative expressionism. Drawing inspiration from personal experience and everyday life, he often incorporates familiar objects like stools, flowers, or comic book figures into his compositions. At the same time, his work explores deeper themes, including those drawn from biblical stories, handled with a style that merges intensity and reflection. His paintings evoke the improvisational freedom of jazz and the layered textures of progressive rock, while retaining a poetic intimacy that bridges the internal and external worlds.
- A major milestone in his career was the large-scale solo exhibition at Liljevalchs Konsthall in 2012, curated under the direction of Mårten Castenfors. This ambitious presentation offered a sweeping view of Ingvarsson’s extensive and diverse practice, reaffirming his place as one of Sweden’s most vital artistic voices.
- Over the years, Ingvarsson’s works have been widely exhibited and are held in numerous public and private collections, including Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Gothenburg Museum of Art, Borås Art Museum, Malmö Art Museum, and Norrköping Art Museum. In 1996, he was elected a member of the Royal Academy of Art, and in 2018 he was awarded the prestigious Prince Eugen Medal for outstanding artistic achievement.
Axel Versteegh
- Born in Sweden, 1989
- Axel Versteegh is a painter based in Stockholm. His practice revolves around the relationship between the body and the image, characterized by layered abstraction and gestural forms. Versteegh received his MFA from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, where he studied from 2013 to 2018, including an exchange year at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts in 2014–2015. His work has been shown in exhibitions across Sweden. Tunica mucosa at Ditte Lauridsen is his first solo exhibition in Stockholm. Versteegh’s painting draws from materialist traditions while remaining grounded in physical presence and poetic gesture. His influences range from German and Nordic expressionism to stand-up comedy. He lives and works in Stockholm.