Biography
Fredrik Åkum (b. 1987, SE) lives and works in Gothenburg. He is primarily known for his abstract paintings guided by a self-regulating and immersive practice where the idea of the copy is prominent. By way of a carefully calibrated set of conditions, Åkum diligently copies and draws from his own work to see in which way the repetition leads him. Running parallel to his painting practice is an involved interest in printing and publishing. Found in the intersection of the various arms of Åkum’s practice are consistent and scalable ideas relating to presentation, context and architecture. Fredrik Åkum holds an MFA from Valand Academy. He is the recipient of numerous accolades from the likes of Beckers Art Award and Hasselblad Foundation.
Text: Ophelia Rolf, Gallery Steinsland Berliner
Download: Biography/Resume as PDF
Contact
E-mail: contact@fredrikakum.com
Social Media: Instagram, Artsy
Inquiries: Gallery Steinsland Berliner, Bondegatan 70, 11633 Stockholm, SE.
Sunless Press: Sunless Press is a non-profit publishing imprint founded by Fredrik Åkum in 2022 and based in Gothenburg, SE. Working within contemporary art, the imprint publishes limited edition zines and artist books with a particular focus on drawing, painting, and photography. Most titles are made by hand. Each publication takes shape through close collaboration with the contributing artist, where dialogue and shared process are central to the work. Beyond publishing, Sunless Press periodically organises exhibitions alongside its releases, and since early 2026 has a dedicated project space, Duvan.
Bildupphovsrätt: All photographs on this website are by Fredrik Åkum unless otherwise stated. Fredrik Åkum is a member of Bildupphovsrätt. When publishing or reproducing images, please credit them as © Fredrik Åkum / Bildupphovsrätt 2026.
Texts
Pine
Fredrik Åkum’s artistic practice revolves around painting as process. Through repetition, distortion, and abstraction, he explores the balance between chance and control, intuition and reflection. Painting has always formed the foundation of Åkum’s artistic practice. In his early works, he worked figuratively with landscape painting, engaging with themes of Romanticism and the Sublime. Gradually, he began reflecting on painting on a more philosophical level, inspired by Plato’s ideas of representation and mimesis. Plato regarded artistic representation as inherently secondary, since the artist merely reproduces something that is already itself an image of the world of ideas. It was here—together with Åkum’s ongoing work with fanzines and artist books, where the photocopier became a frequently used tool—that his interest in abstraction emerged. Through copying and repetition, he seeks to render the visual language autonomous, allowing the works to develop through reworkings until their original point of departure is forgotten and something new can emerge. Chance and control are central, and he continually 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 in continual exploration, where the works are understood as attempts or manifestations of an abstract will.
Nature—or more broadly, the surrounding environment—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 evolved, inspiration drawn from nature has increasingly been replaced by references to 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 layers of abstraction and is transformed into colour reflecting colour.
Åkum works across a wide range of techniques and materials, including 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 the work forward. The relief works are rapid and spontaneous. He presses fragments of, for example, discarded clay sculptures into clay, allows the impressions to dry, and then casts them—a method he likens to analogue photography, where the result is not revealed until development is complete. The process can feel both instantaneous and prolonged at the same time. Painting, by contrast, is a much slower process that may unfold over several months. Despite these differences, the processes continually inform one another. Åkum’s interest in reliefs grew from a desire to create objects rather than images, yet 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 seen in the exhibition at Lidköpings Konsthall. The exhibition also presents the series Promemoria (Memo), consisting of drawings made during travels as well as in the studio. The series functions as a kind of diary, in which the images are created according to the conditions available at hand, with the format of the paper serving as a limitation. The drawings are then assembled in a disrupted chronology to create new wholes.
Excerpt from the exhibition text written by Amanda Östberg on the occasion of the solo exhibition Pine, Lidköpings Konsthall, Lidköping, SE, 2025.
Run to the Horizon
The nature around us is changeable. It is sometimes difficult to grasp it and we can feel distanced from it, perhaps because most of us do not fully understand its cyclical and complex nature. At the same time we live in a time where it is absolutely necessary that we start to understand the world around us and our role in it. In these years we must reflect on today’s questions about humanity’s relationship with nature, which is a complex task for an individual who is simply part of the mass we call humanity. But we can start somewhere. We can start by approaching our surroundings with an observing and inquisitive look, searching for something familiar, and trying to understand the world around us.
Run to the horizon is a newly produced exhibition by Fredrik Åkum and an artistic investigation of what is outside ourselves: the terrain, the surroundings, and nature. The exhibition takes form as an intuitive investigation that works across media such as photography, drawing, painting, and relief in a caring and curious mapping of the connections in the world.
Through observation, documentation recollection and by drawing inspiration from the changing landscapes by Skagen, Fredrik Åkum creates a pictorial and poetic universe in which we can try to create new connections to our surroundings and where there is room for both longing and curiosity. Run to the horizon is thus an artistic study of time and change and a space filled with sensuous snapshots of the world around us as a concrete albeit fragmentary reflection in both time and space.
Through neat and controlled observations, visual diary entries, and with room for changeability, Fredrik Åkum invites us to approach the world we live in with a playful and curious look. A look that can lead us to something familiar or something new and to a place that contains great poetic power in relation to today’s big questions about man’s relationship with nature and the pending climate and biodiversity crisis.
Fredrik Åkum (SE) lives and works in Gothenburg. Fredrik Åkum graduated from Akademin Valand in Gothenburg (2013) and Run to the horizon is his first solo exhibition in Denmark. Fredrik Åkum’s practice is characterized by visual experiments and poetic distinctions with a strong anchoring in a playful and intuitive visual practice. His work often takes the form of an exploration of abstract qualities, where the core is the various trials and experiments, which constantly aim for something unattainable across media such as photography, drawing, painting, and sculptural forming of objects.
Written by Anne Møller Christensen and Sara Løvschall Grøntved on the occasion of the solo exhibition Run to the horizon, Skal Contemporary, Skagen, DK, 2024.
Waiting for the Summer Rain
There is no repetition. So it is said. Nevertheless, we seem to be really good at identifying one thing as being the same thing as another thing. Again, and again. And that is partly how we make sense of everything – and that is what makes it possible to speak about … anything. Making sense is all about being forgetful of the fact that nothing makes sense – that is, that nothing really turns out to be what it is said to be.
Gertrude Stein wasn’t too concerned with making sense. For her, an artist’s duty is to leave things as they are, to let everything be what it is. And she wasn’t forgetful: that there is no repetition wasn’t a problem for her, but a condition. Hence, she preferred to talk about “insistence” rather than repetition. Actually, she insisted on this – again, and again: “Then we have insistence insistence [sic] that in its emphasis can never be repeating, because insistence is always alive and if it is alive it is never saying anything in the same way because emphasis can never be the same …” (“Portraits and Repetition”, 1935)
Insistence reveals itself as a certain kind of diligence of the expression – of the literary as well as the painterly expression – and therefore insistence is always a matter of form. Consequently, insistence also amounts to an emphasizing of the material properties of the expression. There are things – and there is change. Things change.
Is painting to be understood as language? I don’t know, but there are certainly languages of painting, just as there is a fundamental quality of same-but-different in how forms and colors are being applied to a surface – which, by the way, also goes for how we are calibrated to look at images in general.
But it is one thing how a viewer insists on identifying – subsuming what is particular under what is universal – and another thing how a painter insists on a specific form or material. While the viewer, in order to make sense, will tend to dispossess the singular object of its singularity, the artist, who in producing objects insists on certain forms, instead brings back singularity to the world – thus reminding us of the senselessness of what is. Indeed, what might at a first glance come across as repetition, reproduction, and duplication, actually gives the world back to us in its infinite variations of unique occurrences.
The insistence Stein wrote and talked about a century ago certainly has its equivalence in the reappearances that occurs in Fredrik Åkum’s works: paintings, objects, and publications that reinstalls singularity lost in world fixated on similarity. But how can insistence and reappearance be the way to make visible a world comprised of a diverse manifold of singularities? Well, insisting on specific forms and matter is in practice to highlight the differences between two things that appears to be, if not the same, at least of the same kind. In Åkum’s case it is not only a matter of creating a visual and material language of forms to be insisted on. It is also a question of reactivating moments and attributes of earlier works, letting similar forms move and change between different objects and mediums. For instance: how traces of an earlier painting make up the basic form of the stucco-like tiles that in Waiting for the Summer Rain (2021) are arranged into a tactile flatness of modular units.
There is a lot of insisting going on here. The recurring forms and shapes insist on how continuity is somehow conditioned by change, and vice versa. But there is also, on a fundamental level, an insistence on painting as such, despite an abundance of sculptural operations that seem to defy the conditions of painting. While the works certainly are sculptural – tactile, three-dimensional, objects rather than images – they do insist on being viewed as paintings: their formats and installation, them being flat enough to be viewed as images, how the color of the modules suggests an unprimed canvas … Even the modularity itself points to the fact that painting can be broken down into units of forms, gestures, pigments, and materials (remember how Duchamp reduced the concept of color into the mere physics of industrially manufactured paint).
One should bear in mind that the insistence in these works isn’t just a dialectical method for emphasizing difference and singularity. To call upon a gaze that breaks with an urge to reduce things into what is familiar, is at the same time to call upon recognition. And to recognize is both to determine similarities and acknowledge differences, simultaneously. I recognize, and therefore accept, that you are different. That is the easy part. But to recognize that we are similar – that is the real crux of, what in the end amounts to, solidarity.
Written by Nils Olsson on the occasion of the solo exhibition Waiting for the Summer Rain, at Galleri Cora Hillebrand, Gothenburg, SE, 2021. The essay was also featured in the artist book with the same name.
Beckers Art Award
Fredrik Åkum certainly has nerve when it comes to his colors and brushwork. Carefully laid cloth on the studio floor becomes a stage for the painted dance of acrylics over the surface of the canvas. The impatient rhythms of color emerge almost manically with repetitions, variations, and gaps – an intricate interaction between big and small. This is an uplifting painting on the border between the figurative and the abstract, between the random and the absolutely controlled, between the light and the darkness. This is a painting that demands obsession and passion – something so amazingly beautiful, marked by a complex perseverance.
Åkum undoubtedly captures us with his plant-based palette of colors, as well as with his fanzines and small art books – his parallel artistic track – which invite visitors to explore their own creativity. High or low, Åkum’s presence is undeniable. Fredrik Åkum is awarded the 2020 Beckers Art Award for his ability to make us understand through his palette that there is so much more in the beauty of painting. Indeed, there is a completely new world of nuances.
Written by Mårten Castenfors on the occasion of the Jury Statement of the Beckers Art Award 2020. The award also included two solo exhibitions at Färgfabriken, Stockholm, SE, and Höganäs Museum & Konsthall, Höganäs, SE.
Tear out pages / Tear of Jacqueline, 2019
Fredrik Åkum is a skilled and experienced painter with an oeuvre displaying dedicated efforts to remove himself and his paintings from a place of comfortable comprehension and expected results. A yearning to be surprised by his own work, to truly experience a work of art as an independent observer has caused Åkum to develop a complex methodological system which assures a certain margin of error for an otherwise precise artist.
An appreciation of printing techniques and a fascination of the inherent conclusiveness of the replicated image is central to his art. Åkum will repeatedly copy his own work, an arduous and lengthy process which gradually takes him further away from the primary painting. He likens this process to the natural glitches and inaccuracies that occur when printing by hand, a sequence of intended copies will rarely turn out identical. His abstract compositions are created by awkwardly crouching on the floor, effectively hindering not only movement but also obstructing a clear view of the canvas. Paint is thinned out with various mediums, making it difficult to control and prone to spontaneous seeping and trickling. It is within these restrictive circumstances that Åkum can experience the suspense of not fully being able to foresee the end result.
The two-part title Tear out Pages/Tear of Jacqueline refers to integral makings of Fredrik Åkum’s perspective. Imagine two pages in a fanzine haphazardly bent or intentionally folded, creating an unexpected picture. This idea of serendipitous constellations acts as the basis for Åkum’s compositions.
Written by Ophelia Rolf on the occasion of the solo exhibition Tear out pages/Tear of Jacqueline, Gallery Steinsland Berliner, Stockholm, SE, 2019.
Spreads
There1 is a fundamental connection between printed matter and Fredrik Åkum’s paintings. Not in the hierarchy that historically places catalogues and fanzines as ancillaries of exhibitions and original artworks, but on a diametrically opposite relation. With his practice, Åkum asks himself and the spectator to poetically reevaluate the established dynamics connecting the concepts of reproduction and documentation with uniqueness and authenticity.
In his aesthetic and approach to painting, it is possible to find a nature which is profoundly historical and what I would define as anti-philological. Copy after copy— the original subjects, or what we should expect as the content depicted onto the canvases, are lost in the tradition of prints, paintings and reproductions that was instrumental to the ultimately exhibited results. It is a methodical process that uses printers and copying as instruments to allow the painted subjects to take always new forms in the seemingly abstract surfaces. The viewer —although— is not asked to search for the initial subject matter or to apply a picture criticism2to inspect these artworks. She is instead presented with the countless ways, methodical or unplanned, in which these images were distorted and idiosyncratically detached from their primeval nature —the painted imprecision which slightly detaches the copy from its matrix, a reproduced cropped section, which renders the initial image indiscernible, or the straight cut and juxtaposition determined by a spread pushed onto the flatbed scanner, inspiring new compositions. Fredrik Åkum’s paintings demand the viewer to appreciate the procedures, mistakes and meaningful variants that furthered them from their subjects while nearing them to the artist’s idea.
The new series that Fredrik Åkum presents in this exhibition, Spreads, consists in the depiction of two pages’ spans from a fanzine of reproductions of his own paintings, turned ninety degrees and painted un-chronologically in almost identical installments. Albeit, it is not on this realisation that the viewer should focus her interest, nor on the original paintings which were depicted on those fanzine’s spreads, nor in the folded fabric depicted in those paintings, nor in the luxuriant vegetation printed on those textiles. The focus should be instead on the way in which all these elements disappeared from the paintings part of Spreads. These canvases do not depict pages, fabric or nature. They portray the microscopic modifications and massive interpolations that gave them new life, encapsulating their subjects in new images which need no history, explanation or philology.
1 This text is an extract from a longer text which is a work in progress at the moment in which this exhibition is opening. Dealing as well with Spreads, but also contextualizing more thoroughly this new series and the way in which it connects with the general artistic practice of Fredrik Åkum— the text will be published later this year in concomitance with a broader survey of his work. 2 Imagined as a discipline analogue to textual criticism, having as its final goal the reconstruction of the original picture as close as possible to what it was before the reproductions and copies which altered its appearance to the point of being unrecognizable. This concept and field of study have been speculatively considered by Kurt Weitzmann as in K. Weitzmann Sailing with Byzantium from Europe to America. The Memoirs of an Art Historian (Munich, 1994), 143–51.
Written by Mattia Lullini on the occasion of the solo exhibition Spread, at Alta Art Space, Malmö, SE, 2019.