Solo Exhibition at Lidköpings Konsthall, Lidköping, SE
2025.01.18–2025.01.03
Exhibition Text, written by Amanda Österberg, Curator
Fredrik Åkum’s artistic practice revolves around painting as a process, where, through repetition, distortion, and abstraction, he explores the balance between chance and control, intuition and reflection.
Fredrik Åkum was born in 1987, and he lives and works in Gothenburg. He received his master’s degree in Fine Art from Valand Academy, Gothenburg, in 2013.
The foundation of Fredrik Åkum’s practice has always been his interest in painting. In his very early works, he worked figuratively with landscape painting, drawn to themes of the Romantic and the Sublime. Gradually, he began to reflect more on painting on a philosophical level, inspired by Plato’s ideas on representation, mimesis. Plato regarded artistic representation as meaningless, since the artist merely reproduced something that was already an image of the world of ideas. It was here, together with Åkum’s ongoing work with fanzines and artist books—where the photocopier is a frequently employed tool—that his interest in abstraction emerged. Through copies and repetitions, he seeks to render the visual language autonomous, allowing the works to develop through reworkings until their point of departure is forgotten and something new arises. Chance and control are central, and he constantly searches for the unexpected as a way forward. Knowing where a work is headed or how it will conclude is of little importance; instead, the focus lies on continual exploration, where he regards the works as attempts or manifestations of an abstract will.
Nature—or rather the surrounding environment more broadly—has always been an important source of inspiration in Åkum’s practice. Everywhere, details may become part of his ever-expanding image bank. As his practice has developed, inspiration from nature has increasingly been replaced by his own works, forming a self-sustaining cycle of ideas. A painting might, for example, have fifty drawings as its foundation. The original point of departure—such as a photograph of a twig or a pile of pine needles—disappears within the layers of abstraction and is transformed into color reflecting color.
Fredrik Åkum works with a wide range of techniques and materials—photography, drawing, painting, sculpture, relief, fanzines, and artist books. These processes influence one another and shape his artistic expression; the different techniques interact and propel his art forward. The relief works are rapid and spontaneous. He presses parts of, for example, discarded clay sculptures, allows the clay with the impressions to dry, and then casts them—a method he likens to analogue photography, where the result is not revealed until the development is complete. The process can be both instantaneous and prolonged at the same time. Painting, by contrast, is a much slower process that may take several months to unfold. Despite these differences, the processes influence one another. Åkum’s interest in reliefs grew from a desire to create objects rather than images, but the work with reliefs has, in turn, transformed his painting. What was once thin and delicate has become denser, with thicker layers and richer textures, as can be seen in the exhibition at Lidköpings Konsthall. The exhibition also presents the series Promemoria (Memo), consisting of drawings made in various places during travels, but also in the studio. The series functions as a kind of diary, where the images were created using the conditions available at hand, with the framework of the paper as a limitation. The drawings are then assembled in a disrupted chronology to create new wholes.
