Gustav
Hjelmgren

Gustav Hjelmgren (b. 1979, Sweden) is a Stockholm-based painter whose practice moves between large-scale oil paintings and intimate studio studies. His work is shaped by repetition, slow accumulation and a chromatic devotion that returns again and again to the act of looking.

Hjelmgren grew up in a family of painters — his great-great grandfather was the renowned Swedish painter Richard Bergh, and his grandmother painted her entire life. A self-taught artist with a background as a trained nurse, Hjelmgren brings to his work a deep consideration of human experience — qualities that shape his meditative and introspective approach to painting.

His recent body of work, Maitri, takes its title from the Sanskrit term for loving-kindness: an active attitude of warmth, empathy and non-harm toward oneself and others. In Buddhist and Hindu traditions, maitri denotes an unconditional friendliness cultivated through awareness and practice — a foundation for compassion, ethical conduct and inner balance. The paintings extend this temperament into form: soft, undulating, slippery shapes that nestle together, never agitated, never frantic — a quiet counterforce to the unrest and hardships of the world.

The Maitri paintings are made on the floor, often several at once, with oil paint thinned and applied through sponges and large brushes — a process that is physical, direct and responsive, balancing accident and intent. The works belong to a broader lineage of gestural abstraction and post-war colour painting — a tradition that runs from the Abstract Expressionists and Color Field painters, with Helen Frankenthaler as a touchstone, where surface, repetition and chromatic patience carry as much meaning as image.

Hjelmgren paints intuitively. He rarely begins with a plan; instead, the work arrives in clusters, and what those clusters are about tends to reveal itself only later — as if the paintings know before he does. Series and themes surface like undercurrents of consciousness, slow tides of attention that the studio brings to the surface one canvas at a time. The ongoing Presence series is one such current: soft concentric rings of colour built outward from a single point, hypnotic compositions that pulse and radiate, sitting in conversation with Jasper Johns, Kenneth Noland and Ugo Rondinone.

Hjelmgren's work was included in Hey Hey, My My at Eric Firestone Gallery, New York (2025), and he recently completed a permanent wall mural commission for Scandic Malmen, Stockholm. He has shown at Larsen / Warner (2026), Blugiallo Tvåtrappor (2025, curated by Roland-Philippe Kretzschmar), Galleri Torekov (2023) and Galleri Duerr (2016–2021). His earliest abstract studies — large squeegee-built canvases made in admiration of Gerhard Richter — caught the attention of the Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic Jerry Saltz in 2016, and his works are held in collections from New York and London to Seoul.