Anna Tedestam, SE

Anna Tedestam (b. 1991) is a sculptor and painter educated at Konstfack (Stockholm’s University of Arts, Crafts and Design), where she was awarded a Master’s degree in 2019.

In both 2020 and 2022, she was the recipient of a one-year work scholarship from the Swedish Arts Grants Committee. She has received public commissions throughout Sweden in, for example, Växjö, Gothenburg, Strängnäs and Lidingö, and her work is represented in many of the country’s municipalities and regions, as well as at its Public Art Agency. Her famous installation The Last Party was shown for the first time in the Odenplan art booth in Stockholm, and has since been exhibited in several galleries around the country.

In Anna Tedestam’s world, it is the directness and intensity of life around us that is given form in clay. Her artistic expression is burlesque, spasmodic and straightforward, her temperament simultaneously fragile and bombastic. This paradox generates a sleepless and aesthetic seriality combined with a craftsmanship as driven as it is challenging.

Discernible in her work, expressed in both painterly and three-dimensional form, is a sense of exploration that is ultimately about making decisions. When, for instance, it is time to stop leaving traces on a surface or instead proceed with another layer, adding more and more until the resulting expression must be peeled off and covered over. In altering the outcome of the work with the power of her hand, there is nevertheless a respect and an attentiveness. Her inner creativity is guided by such questions as ‘What happens next?’ and ‘What can this form manage without?’