Paul Fägerskiöld

The Bærtling Scholarship 2022

Paul Fägerskiöld was born in 1982 in Stockholm, where he also lives and works. He obtained his Master’s degree in Fine Arts from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm in 2010 and has studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.

Justification:

Paul Fägerskiöld receives the Bærtling Scholarship 2022 for a methodical and meticulously crafted painting where the boundary between the representational and the abstract is constantly challenged. Fägerskiöld operates with a very restrained expression where the representational elements are almost completely reduced to simple signs, yet in a painting that, in all its simplicity, exhibits technical brilliance with clear poetic undertones.

Paul Fägerskiöld resembles Olle Bærtling’s quest for what he called “open form.” Just like Bærtling, there is an infinite perspective in Fägerskiöld’s paintings. Whereas Bærtling sought outside the frame, Fägerskiöld seeks his expanded space more in depth, where small details and shifts seem to open up a new universe for the viewer. Unlike Bærtling, Fägerskiöld does not exclude the representational, but rather uses it to draw attention to the materiality of painting and the concrete image.