A Painters’ Salon: Björkholmen Gallery at Market Art Fair 2025

If Andersson’s work creates space through the restraint of colour and form, Fredrik Brånstad approaches space by constructing it, layer by layer, through references, structure, and mood. His paintings depict architectural conditions assembled from both art historical and contemporary sources, merging into new visual realities.

Brånstad’s works depict reduced surfaces that build these conditions, with his visual language residing at the boundary between security and vulnerability, where public space becomes a carrier of subjective experience. Through his craft, he creates an expression where personal presence is central. He puts great effort into finding the point where form and content support one another, considering how colour, material, and format influence the relationship between painting, room, and viewer.

Where Brånstad constructs atmospheres through spatial reference, Lukas Göthman works through language and emotion. His practice revolves around a series of journeys – lived experiences, selected realities, or imagined dreams – translated into text-based compositions. Often appearing as short stories, titles, or recurring phrases, Göthman’s words become visual elements, building abstract structures across monochromatic colour fields.

Curves and impressions emerge from self-imposed rules, while other works delve into dreamlike landscapes. Together, they form an intensely personal world, where expressive text and colour draw the viewer into the artist’s inner reflections.

While Göthman immerses viewers in an emotional topography shaped by language and colour, Paul Housley turns inward, using traditional genres as a framework for psychological reflection.

Based in London, Housley has a singular ability to depict his subjects in a style that is both direct and elusive. Though many of his works nod to the old masters, their small scale resists grandeur, placing iconic portraits and everyday objects on equal footing. In Housley’s hands, subject matter – whether a knick-knack or a figure – becomes secondary to the act of painting itself.

Landscape, still life, and portraiture are staples of his practice, yet their boundaries are continually pushed. A snow-covered scene, for instance, may quietly double as a self-portrait, revealing an emotional landscape as much as a physical one.

Hans Isaksson’s work invites the viewer into a realm where appearances are both precise and deceptive. Though his artistic methods vary, his core interest lies in sculpture, often driven by illusion and conceptual play. Across media, including his photographic series of film end notes, Isaksson consistently returns to the question of perception.

This becomes especially clear in his lifelike fruit sculptures: meticulously crafted, they mimic real produce in form and scale. Yet the moment one attempts to lift a banana peel from the floor, the unexpected heaviness of lead breaks the illusion. However elegant, the work remains tethered to the everyday – a meditation on consumption, recognition, and the subtle misdirections of vision.

Where Isaksson explores illusion and the slippage between object and idea, Anton Lind turns his gaze to the accumulation of imagery and time. His paintings are the result of a rule-based process in which vast amounts of visual material are compressed into singular, layered compositions. Drawing on art history, personal archives, and fleeting moments from moving images, Lind creates works where past, present, and future seem to converge.

By translating movement into stillness and juxtaposing the familiar with the unknown, Lind’s paintings evoke a sense of simultaneity – reflecting the modern desire to grasp everything at once. Yet within this density lies a search for clarity: an attempt to create something entirely new through the very act of distillation.

If Lind’s approach compresses time into form, Sofie Proos stretches it out – drawing connections across centuries through texture, detail, and sensation. Her paintings often begin with a historical reference: a fragment of velvet, a Renaissance garden, a forgotten ornament. But rather than recreating these motifs, she transforms them, infusing them with a contemporary sensibility and emotional resonance.

Proos’ practice navigates the porous boundary between the ornamental and the organic, revealing an interest in how memory, care, and craft are preserved and reinterpreted over time. Her works shimmer with fragility and depth, inviting reflection not just on beauty, but on the shifting relationship between culture and nature. In this way, she offers an art that is both intimate and expansive – a quiet, tactile bridge between past and present.