Gunnel Wåhlstrand: Memory Maps - Features - Independent Art Fair

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“I don’t think of it as a technique – it’s more like I am developing something. It’s just like in a darkroom, everything is light, and then I darken things. I do the motif hundreds of times, but I make it a little darker all the time. So I repeat every detail and finally I know the picture. I don’t paint things dark right away, but I keep at it so that I learn it by heart... I have been there and understood it; I’ve made it mine. It becomes my place.”¹

Gunnel Wåhlstrand: Memory Maps - Features - Independent Art Fair

Gunnel Wåhlstrand, The Lonely Rowan, 2025, courtesy of the artist and Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm, Paris

This is how Gunnel Wåhlstrand described the painstaking artistic process behind her large-scale ink wash paintings in 2016. Anyone who has had the chance to see her photorealistic yet poetic works cannot be other than utterly mesmerized. Spanning portraits, interiors, landscapes, and nature studies, often featuring water and a mysterious glimmering light, Wåhlstrand’s production is sparse—about 50 works in the past 20 years. She spends up to six months with each painting. Through this process of repetition and utmost focus, she creates visually stunning worlds that are loaded with intensity and universally affecting presence.

Wåhlstrand’s first encounter with ink wash occurred early in her studies at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, when she saw Marlene Dumas’s grid of paintings Jesus Serene (1994). The work made an incredibly strong impression on her, and she immediately felt the urge to engage with this fascinating medium.

The method she now masters to perfection is extremely demanding and slow, leaving no margin for error. Unlike watercolor, ink cannot be altered or erased once it touches the paper. Tonality and shading emerge through controlled ink density, brush pressure, and multiple layers painted from light to dark. The ever-present risk of a slip of the hand keeps the artist sharp and attentive.

Gunnel Wåhlstrand: Memory Maps - Features - Independent Art Fair

Gunnel Wåhlstrand, Wave, 2015, courtesy of the artist and Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm, Paris. Private Collection.

Wåhlstrand has her studio next to her home on an island in Stockholm. It is a private space that preserves the intimate relationship between her and the motif. She works on a large scale in order to feel small next to the images. Wåhlstrand never wants to show an unfinished painting, believing that to reveal something too soon would threaten the process. “For me, the studio is almost holy—a mental space everyone ought to have,” she says, in words that evoke Virginia Woolf’s powerful essay A Room of One’s Own. The parallel extends even further, to the psychological aspects of both artists’ work and how the shifting ocean can mirror the inner world.

Music plays a special role in Wåhlstrand’s artistic process—she never paints in silence. Cocooned in the studio, she will often play an album loudly and on repeat. Music bounces her in different directions, she explains, helping her tune into the painting process and guiding her incremental decisions. Early electronic composers such as Wendy Carlos, Delia Derbyshire, or Daphne Oram often feature on her playlist. With classical, she first delved into Baroque before moving on to Romantic composers like Mahler and Bruckner. She has been listening to Pauline Oliveros while painting the coastal landscapes that will be shown at Independent, with Andréhn-Schiptjenko gallery.

The rewards of classical music have not always been self-evident. Wåhlstrand learned to appreciate it as an adult, relishing the moment when “something happens in the brain” and a complex symphony finally unfolds. This kind of commitment and perseverance—immersing oneself in something that initially resists understanding—is central to Wåhlstrand’s artistic process. There are no shortcuts.

Gunnel Wåhlstrand: Memory Maps - Features - Independent Art Fair

Britta Byström, Ink-Wash on Paper, concert at Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde, 2025. Photographer: Lars Edelholm/PEW.

The interplay between music and painting can flow both ways. The Swedish composer Britta Byström created Ink-Wash on Paper for eight musicians, drawing inspiration from seven paintings by Wåhlstrand. Byström was especially struck by the melancholic mood and the peculiar relationship between light and darkness in Wåhlstrand’s work: the sense of light that emerges from the unpainted areas. To mirror this effect musically, Byström used reverberation, allowing lingering resonances of held notes to serve as a counterpart to the unpainted white.

“The white is exciting. I love to paint blinding sunlight and glitter, because you sort of paint around it. The darkness can’t get through and you end up blinded by something that isn’t there. It’s like light therapy, like a physical phenomenon. Afterwards you feel as if you’ve been out in the sun.”
-Gunnel Wåhlstrand²

Gunnel Wåhlstrand: Memory Maps - Features - Independent Art Fair

Gunnel Wåhlstrand, By the Window / Vid fönstret, 2003, courtesy of the artist and Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm, Paris. Collection Michael Storåkers.

Gunnel Wåhlstrand: Memory Maps - Features - Independent Art Fair

Gunnel Wåhlstrand, Mother in Colour, 2024, courtesy of the artist and Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm, Paris. Private collection.

Wåhlstrand draws her body of motifs from personal history, family photographs, and more recently, her own snapshots from places rich in memory. For over a decade, her art has sought to bridge the distance to her absent father, who took his life when she was just one year old. His death was a silenced topic in the family, and even as a child, she examined family photos in an attempt to understand him. These images became the foundation of her oeuvre, through which she made her breakthrough at her graduation exhibition in 2003.

Wåhlstrand’s time-consuming artistic method evolved from a deep need to linger and immerse herself in the world of family photographs. Transcending time and space, her paintings interweave the gazes of three generations, whose relationships have been shaped by absence and distance. The portraits of the boy with melancholic eyes, her father, were captured by her grandfather. Other family photographs were taken by her father, allowing Wåhlstrand to adopt his gaze, such as his loving view of her mother. Finally, there is Wåhlstrand herself—daughter and granddaughter—looking back and slowly reconstructing the images as if to piece together the puzzle of her father’s past.

A long time after creating these paintings, Wåhlstrand realized that they had also helped her to process her emotions towards her mother and, in a way, prepared her for the inevitable loss. Yet it was only years after her mother’s passing that she fully allowed the sorrow to surface—and with it, the urge to return to the painted mother.

Gunnel Wåhlstrand: Memory Maps - Features - Independent Art Fair

Gunnel Wåhlstrand, Towards An Outer Island, 2025, courtesy of the artist and Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm, Paris.

In her most recent works, Wåhlstrand has shifted her focus to landscapes and nature studies of an island on Sweden’s west coast where she spent every childhood summer. Now, her own daughter climbs the rocks, retracing Wåhlstrand’s steps through the same environment that appears in many of the family photographs she has studied. This time Wåhlstrand is the photographer, taking quick snapshots with her mobile phone, almost absentmindedly, as she savors the moment.

Only later, in the solitude of her studio, does she carefully select the most evocative scenes, cropping the composition and adjusting the light and density to transform it into painting. The pixelated digital image allows her to channel memory over detail, letting the painted landscape evolve into a deeply personal, interior space.

“I don’t know what it is about this particular place that touches me so, but it feels more eternal than others. In terms of time, I have been on the painted island longer than the physically real one. When I think of the place, I no longer know which version it is.”³
-Gunnel Wåhlstrand

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Selina Kiiskinen is an art historian and curator at the Turku Art Museum in Finland. She is curating Gunnel Wåhlstrand’s solo exhibition at the museum from June 6 to September 14, 2025, in collaboration with Prince Eugen’s Waldemarsudde, Stockholm. Kiiskinen has curated solo shows of artists such as Sasha Huber, Shoji Ueda, and Emma Helle, and group exhibitions including Three Views on the Landscape, surveying Finnish modern painters Werner Holmberg, Hjalmar Munsterhjelm, and Victor Westerholm.

¹ ‘Through Time and Space, a conversation between Gunnel Wåhlstrand and Bronwyn Griffith’, Gunnel Wåhlstrand. Exhibition catalogue no. 45, Magasin III Museum & Foundation for Contemporary Art, Art and Theory Publishing, Stockholm, 2017.

² ‘Tor Billgren: Absence and Resonance. A Conversation with Gunnel Wåhlstrand and Britta Byström’, liner notes of Britta Byström: Ink-Wash On Paper. A Piece inspired by Seven Paintings by Gunnel Wåhlstrand. For Eight Musicians, 2025, vinyl record, edition of 250.

³ ‘Gunnel Wåhlstrand at Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm, Sweden, 2023’, p11, https://www.andrehn-schiptjenko.com/usr/library/documents/main/artists/30/gw_portfolio_2024_lr.pdf (accessed 21 March 2025)