Profiles

• Yoko Andersson Yamano

  Yoko Andersson Yamano is a glass artist based in Stockholm. After graduating from university in Japan, she studied glassblowing techniques at Kosta Boda Glass Blowing School, within the oldest glassworks in Scandinavia, before obtaining a masters’ degree at the Konstfack (University of Arts, Crafts and Design) in Sweden. She works in clear glass, and exhibits her works internationally, including Sweden, the UK and Japan.

  

• Sambe Masahiro

  Photographer, born in Tokyo in 1983. After graduating from Tokyo Visual Arts College, he studied under photographer Tomari Akio and became independent in 2006. Since around 2015, he has been photographing his personal work “landscape,” which captures landscapes that work beyond the composites of the artificial and the natural. In addition to art and architecture, he also works on commissions in the fields of music and fashion.

  

• Anna Bjerger

  Born in Skallsjö in 1973, Bjerger now lives in Småland. After graduating from Central St. Martins School of Art and Design, she completed a study programme at the Royal College of Art. While she physically clips motifs and scenes encountered in everyday life, her creation of paintings that are suffused with literature is the fruit of her fine perception of light and shadow and her masterly use of the experimental support medium of aluminium foil.

  

• Anna Camner

  Born in Stockholm in 1977, Camner now lives in the same city. Since graduating from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, she has mostly painted thin membranes, These membranes, which extend to fill the entire surface of the painting, are frozen in their pliancy, possessing both a hermetic sense as of holding one’s breath and the permeability of skin, and are simultaneously inorganic and erotic. Author and photographer Carl Abrahamsson describes Camner’s work as “a colourful darkness”.

  

• Ylva Carlgren

  Born in Luleå in 1984, Carlgren now lives in Stockholm. Having obtained an MFA from the Valand Academy in Göteborg in 2012, she is a painter of abstract watercolours. In her earlier works she took perfume flasks as her motif, diligently painting their shape and light enmeshed in reflections, refractions and prisms. Recently, however, she has left behind the depiction of solid objects to focus on the expression of darkness, shadows and light itself, using her own individual wash-based technique of applying numerous fine layers of watercolour.

  

• Jens Fänge

  Born in Göteborg in 1965, Fänge now lives in Stockholm. He graduated from the Valand Academy in 1994, and is known for his collages of a variety of elements and media (such as oils, pencil, vinyl, cardboard and textiles) cut out in a particular form. Without reference to the hierarchy of traditional painting genres, he juxtaposes portraits, still lives, interiors, cityscapes and geometric forms within the same painting. Combining multiple perspectives, he creates a multicoloured space and manufactures a variety of relationships between the various images, constructing a world that is at once complex and appealing.

  

• Carl Hammoud

  Born in Stockholm in 1976, Hammoud now lives in the same city, after completing postgraduate studies at the Valand Academy. His still lives often feature perfectly balanced piles of books and chairs, which are illuminated by light that strikes them obliquely or sideways. The way that these still lives appear to have chosen to be this way of their own volition, rather than having been arranged by someone, is reminiscent of the futurist style that attempted to incorporate time into paintings.

  

• Carl Michael Lundberg

  Born in Stockholm in 1972, Lundberg now lives in Vallvik. After obtaining MFA from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, he started to paint all the things he saw around him every day, influenced by Swedish artist Annette Sunneby (born 1951), Icelandic painter Helgi Fríðjónsson (born 1953) and Swedish art critic Ulf Linde (1929–2013). His small paintings display a riotous parade of motifs concerning life and death, light and shadow, with everything equally relishing its existence.

  

• Niklas Holmgren

  Born in Lycksele in 1974, Holmgren now lives in Stockholm. He obtained an MFA from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm in 2001. His painting, which is characterised by a use of light and colour that can be described as hyperrealistic, are known for their style hinting at the transient states of mind of individual people and interactions that cannot be seen. He closely observes familiar things, setting out to represent what lies at the core of people and things. He is also active as a film director and scriptwriter.

  

• Maria Nordin

  Born in Linköping in 1980, Nordin now lives in Stockholm. She obtained an MFA from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm in 2010. Her large-format watercolour paintings take the motif of the human body as their main element. The movement of the human body, frozen in an instant and painted as if in stop-motion, appeals directly to the bodily sensations of the viewer. Her theme is how an experience is expressed through the human body, or how physical experience can be shaped.

  

• Rebecka Tollens

  Born in Stockholm in 1990, French-Swedish artist Tollens moved to France in 2009, but has been based in Stockholm since 2018. Between 2011 and 2015 she studied at LISAA and the École de Condé in Paris where she obtained her MFA. She makes charcoal drawings using charcoal and graphite pencils on a variety of supporting media, including paper, wood and walls. She gathers fragments from dreams that deliver a lucid glimpse of the invisible, folk tales and the story of her life, creating her own individual hyperrealistic space in her pictures in the attempt to explore sensation in the interstices between known and unknown, the real thing and fabrications.

  

• Ishida Junichi

  Born in Saitama in 1981, Ishida now lives in Saitama. He graduated from the Department of Fine Art of Nihon University College of Art in 2004, and paints still lives of familiar objects such as antiques and fruit, using an orthodox technique. The time inherent in these objects, together with their light, is depicted in these exquisite oil paintings born out of his unflinching gaze on what lies before him.

  

• Iba Yasuko

  Born in Kyoto in 1967, Iba now lives in Kyoto. Having completed a major in printmaking at Kyoto Saga University of Arts Junior College in 1990, she has been creating oil paintings and other works based on photographs she takes herself of pottery, cushions and other familiar objects under natural light. By focusing on the colours of her subjects and their reflected light, as well as the quality of the distance and atmosphere that lie between them and the eyes of the artist, she investigates the act of seeing.

  

• Ogasawara Miwa

  Born in Kyoto in 1973, Ogasawara moved to Germany in 1991 and is now based in Hamburg, where she studied at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg under Norbert Schwontkowski and Werner Büttner. Her tranquil, greyish paintings, filled with light and shadow, also encompass the surrounding atmosphere and time. While aware of philosophical topics and social issues, she takes everyday landscapes and scenes as her subjects in compositions from unusual angles that prompt a shift in perspective on the part of the viewer.

  

• Kimura Saiko

  Born in Tokyo in 1979, Kimura now lives in Saga. After graduating from the Department of Fine Arts of Tokyo Zokei University in 2003, she completed a research studentship at that university the following year. She takes the subjects of her paintings from the natural world around her, mainly plants. She photographs these and their surrounding scenery, and paints them in oils mixed with beeswax. Her pictures are distinguished by their sense of transparency suffused with wind and light, and snatch a moment of the everyday beauty displayed by the natural world. She also works on book covers and illustrations, and currently contributes illustrations for the regular Hi wo mekuru oto (“The sound of turning the calendar, one day at a time”) column in the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper written by Kuroi Senji.

  

• Kusanagi Shinpei

  Born in Tokyo in 1973, Kusanagi still lives there. After graduating from the Setsu Mode Seminar art school in 2001, he started exhibiting his work in 2002. Using acrylics on untreated canvas, he creates landscape paintings characterised by improvisational brushstrokes and bleeding colours. His richly coloured works include no specific details, and rather than a clear place or object, they evoke memories of particular times and places within the viewer.

  

• Kobayashi Katsunori

  Born in Hyogo in 1961, Kobayashi now lives in Tokyo. After graduating from the Department of Sculpture of Tokyo National University of Fine Arts in 1987, he went on to obtain a master’s degree there before entering Brera Academy in 1989. He does not restrict himself to sculpture, but also works in media as diverse as photography, watercolours and prints. Whatever the medium, he carries out every stage of the process himself: for a bronze, that means everything from the original model to the cast, and for photography, everything from making the lenses and camera himself to working in the dark room.

  

• Tabata Koichi

  Born in Tochigi in 1979, Tabata now lives in Berlin. After graduating from the Department of Intermedia Art of Tokyo National University of Fine Arts in 2004, he obtain an MFA in oil painting from that university in 2006. Tabata produces paintings that incorporate kinetic elements, and video works that have been composed with underlying painterly constraints. Employing such shifts between media or inherent to the support, rather than restricting himself to a single understanding of the object before his eyes, he carefully brings out the multiple imagery potentially contained within it through the flow of time and space.

  

• Yaegashi Yui

  Born in Chiba in 1985, Yaegashi now lives in Tokyo. After graduating from the Department of Painting of Tokyo Zokei University in 2009, she obtained MFA from that university in 2011. From 2020 to 2021 she lived in New York. Her paintings are geometric designs reminiscent of textile patterns. Yaegashi’s work is characterised by her uniquely systematic manner of painting. She carefully identifies every aspect of the process, including the colours and implements she will use and the order in which she will paint, giving rise to a quiet, comfortable tension in the paintings created with such detachment.

  

• Senay Berhe

  Born in Stockholm in 1979. Self-taught in filmmaking, Senay Berhe has worked in a wide variety of genres including documentaries, commercials, music videos, short films, and photography, and has won many awards. His documentary series “Afripedia” (2014), which follows artists from Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Angola, Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa, has been screened at over 70 film festivals worldwide.