Bukowskis | Contemporary Art & Design | No 631 | April 2021 |Andreas Eriksson

Andreas Eriksson has had an exceptional career ever since he was accepted at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm at only eighteen years old. His big breakthrough came when he represented Sweden at the 2011 Venice Biennale. Today Andreas Eriksson is represented by some of the leading galleries in the world – Stephen Friedman Gallery in London and neugerrimschneider in Berlin.

Nature and specifically trees are central to his work, and his practice is often referred to in terms of a northern European painting tradition. When Eriksson suddenly became afflicted with ‘electromagnetic hypersensitivity’ at the beginning of the 2000s he felt forced to leave his life in the vibrant art capital Berlin, where up until then he had been living and working. He instead chose to live in relative isolation in an electromagnetically screened house by Kinnekulle in the Västergötland province of Sweden. The cacophony of the city was exchanged for quiet walks in nature. This contrast is a clear presence in Eriksson’s images and through his artistic practice he explores the duality of contemporary human life – our dependence on and our relationship to modernity.

Jennifer Higgie (art critic and editor at Frieze magazine) wrote the following in Moderna Museet’s catalogue for the 2011 Venice Biennale, when Eriksson represented Sweden: He (Andreas Eriksson) states that nature is something neutral to him, something that is ‘highly precise and strikingly random’ and which lacks a connection to ‘a deliberate, constructed or strategic context’. He does not consider nature to be something that is in opposition with culture, even if he admits that it is impossible not to filter an environment – or a painting or a sculpture – through one’s own cultural and personal associations. It is, in other words, impossible to see something as solely one thing. Everything generates a chain of connections, an allusion to something else – a memory.

Eriksson is sought after for exhibitions both internationally and within Sweden. In 2007 he received the highly prestigious award ‘Baloise Art Price’ at Statement, Art Basel. His first solo–show at a major art institution was at Bonniers Konsthall in the spring of 2014. The exhibition was a critical success and toured Trondheim Kunstmuseum in Norway, Centre PasquArt in Switzerland and the Reykjavik Art Museum, Iceland.

351. Andreas Eriksson, ‘Fönster och träd II’. Signed Andreas Eriksson and dated 2010 on verso. Dated on the stretcher Medelplana 2010. Acrylic and oil on canvas 180 x 150 cm. (d) Estimate: SEK 200 000 – 250 000 / EUR 19 630 – 24 540