Price: €3000
Artist is based in: Sweden
Adam Engström (b. 2003, Strängnäs, Sweden) is a pop-surrealist painter based in Umeå, Sweden. His artistic practice centres on the body as a carrier of stories—historical, mythological, and personal. Through painting, he explores how these layers can coexist within the same visual world, where past and present merge to generate new and often contradictory narratives.
Moving between the intimate and the universal, Engström examines corporeality, identity, and perception as fluid and constantly renegotiated concepts. Experiences of depersonalization have informed his understanding of the body as something displaced and difficult to define, a perspective that recurs throughout his work in the form of bizarre anatomical transformations. In his paintings, bodies spiral into abstract patterns and mutate into otherworldly forms, symbolising a loss of control within a universe governed by rules different from those of everyday reality.
Engström’s imagery often originates from daydreams, spontaneous sketches, fleeting observations, or encounters with portraits. Embracing intuition and unpredictability, he maintains an open-ended creative process in which images, places, and temporalities flow into one another. The characters that emerge on the canvas frequently become participants in a dialogue, guiding the development of the work. The resulting paintings function as layered assemblages of ideas and associations that collectively shape the narrative core of each piece.
Working exclusively through addition rather than subtraction, Engström allows disparate elements to coexist, inviting confusion as much as clarity and encouraging viewers to discover their own pathways through the image. His visual language draws inspiration from the psychedelic animated films and comics of his childhood, including the works of Ralph Bakshi, Osamu Tezuka, and Satoshi Kon. These influences are combined with references to the Baroque and Renaissance traditions of oil painting, bringing together playfulness and gravity within the same pictorial space.
