Gustav
Hjelmgren

Gustav Hjelmgren (b. 1979, Sweden) is a Swedish painter based in Gustavsberg, 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. 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 applied through hands, sponges and large brushes — a process that is physical, direct and responsive, balancing accident and intent. The newest paintings, taking shape in the studio now, push this further still — painted almost entirely with the hands, the body itself becoming the instrument.

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. Series and themes surface like undercurrents of consciousness, slow tides of attention that the studio brings to the surface one canvas at a time.

Hjelmgren's work was included in My My, Hey Hey 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 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.