• photography Weston Wells courtesy of the artist
    and Mack Art Foundation

    Stockholm Art Week: An Interview With Mark Frygell

    Written by Natalia Muntean by Zohra Vanlerberghe

    Mark Frygell’s art thrives in the liminal space between the grotesque and the playful, where ambiguity sparks open-ended narratives. Born in Umeå’s punk scene and shaped by years as a tattooist, his paintings, vibrant, textured, and teeming with surreal characters, invite viewers into a world where fantasy collides with the uncanny. From Renaissance graffiti to surreal memes, his influences are as eclectic as his output: a testament to a practice driven by curiosity rather than convention.

    Natalia Muntean: Your work often blends the grotesque with the playful, exploring ambiguity and fantasy. How do you approach creating these contrasting elements, and what do you hope viewers take away from your art?

    Mark Frygell:     I hope that what the viewer is taking away is very subjective. To a large extent, when you grow as an artist, you drift further and further away from designing an artwork to have a certain effect on the world and, instead, the outcome of your process becomes something you trust the viewer will find its way in relationship to. Nowadays, we are so used to having things packaged and served to us and, in that sense, artistic work is more important than ever to break that habit and help us see things for what they are. It’s a “shields down” kind of approach, I suppose.

    In the studio, I am most interested in experimenting and discovering where it leads and what the outcome might be. Then, of course, I have my background, taste and hang-ups that colour the aesthetics of what I do. I rarely think too conceptually about what a piece should be or what is good or bad, a failure or a success. Curiosity and interest in the medium, whichever that is, are what drive me to the studio every day.

    I have some sort of obsession with the imaginative and grotesque that colour my work, not as an intention but more as a consequence. I have thought about it a lot and there is something in it that feels transgressive and limitless. Ever since I was a kid, I have had a huge interest in the wonky, weird, and odd. From Garbage Pail Kids and Weirdo Comics to underground roleplaying game illustrations, renaissance graffiti, the Neue Sachlichkeit of the early 20th century, and even the surreal memes created by teenagers in Blender, I am drawn to unconventional forms of expression.

    A couple of years ago, I discovered that the word “grotesque” originates from “grotto-esque,” an aesthetic trend from 15th-century Italy. This trend started when a farmer fell through a hole and found a hidden festive building built by Emperor Nero, with walls adorned by surreal paintings of plants, animals, and humans. Initially, these images were seen as strange and fantastical, but over time, the word began to take on a negative connotation of “ugly,” influenced by conservative views seeking to uphold the status quo.

    NM: Growing up in Umeå’s alternative music scene and working as a tattoo artist, how have these diverse experiences influenced your artistic style and multidisciplinary approach?

    MF:     It has shaped everything I do! One of the advantages of being part of the alternative music scene is its small size, which encourages participation. This creates an environment that is very supportive of creativity. Even if you’re young and inexperienced, you receive a lot of encouragement to explore your talents. As far as tattoos go, I think it has coloured my work less. When I started working professionally with tattooingvaround 2011, the “wild style” was quite new, and adopting a more artistic approach was an interesting way to work. In that sense, the art coloured the tattooing more than the other way around.

    Around 2015, I was also very lucky to become friends with Emil Särelind (Frogmagik) of Deepwood Tattoo in Stockholm. He had studied at Konstfack and was very dedicated to working in a similar vein. It was an interesting time when most other studios focused on traditional tattoos, while the entire scene began to feel stale. He played a significant role in shaping the tattoo landscape in Sweden that we have today, particularly by consistently inviting tattoo artists with similar ideas from all over the world for the past 10 years.

    NM: During your residency with the Mack Art Foundation in NYC, how did the city and its art scene influence your creative process, and what was the most memorable part of that experience?

    MF:     It’s an amazing city, very inspirational, and many people are extremely dedicated to what they are doing in a way that just boosts your creativity. I spent a lot of time walking around all over Brooklyn, Manhattan and Long Island. This is my favourite thing to do in general when I am travelling. You see so much and a new interesting discovery is just a corner away. Of course, it is a luxury to be able to see amazing art shows, alternative music scenes and all the awesome food but it all pales in comparison to just exploring the streets in a city of this magnitude. It maintains its universe somehow.

    Mack Art is also a fantastic residency that was so supportive and made my day-to-day life and work very easy. Christine who runs it is a super active person who just makes things happen.

    NM: You’re collaborating with A Day’s March and have a unique relationship with clothing. How does fashion intersect with your art, and what can we expect from this collaboration?

    MF:     I have a terrible fashion sense myself. Most of the time I just dress in things I have stumbled upon. I don’t really go shopping, and I think most of my clothes are basically memorabilia from my travels, printed shirts that friends have made, and sportswear because it’s comfortable. Plus, I tend to mess up my clothes with paint and stuff anyway.

    With that said, I love looking at people and how they express themselves, and in my paintings I like to come up with clothes for my characters that are unconventional and don’t necessarily fit with a specific time or place.

    When A Day’s March approached me to collaborate, I got excited to just work on material that is not what I am used to. I wanted to see how the clothes I painted would look. In that sense, it’s almost like documenting a process. To be honest, some of the clothes look pretty rough and remind me of my early attempts at making band shirts in high school. However, I kind of like that aesthetic, maybe for nostalgic reasons. I hope when the work is done it will have a big range of looks and it will be visible that they are made in a basement studio by hand and not printed in a shop to have a unified “look”.

    NM: Storytelling is central to your work. What narratives or themes are you currently exploring in your work, and what will you be presenting during Stockholm Art Week?

    MF:     The truth is, I have no idea. I’m just creating and seeing where it takes me. I think storytelling is central, but more as a container for images than as a way to tell a story. I like that feeling from when you were a kid, unable to read, looking through comic books and trying to decipher a story, even though it all felt kind of blurry somehow. Sometimes as an adult, I can get a similar feeling when I encounter art from a culture I’m not familiar with. You can see that there’s a lot of significance and many narratives but you are blocked from reaching them. I find that a very fascinating place to be in, and I try to have the same relationship with my work. If I know exactly what something is and what it communicates, I feel like it’s dead and a failure once I’m finished. I need some space left in a work to keep my brain active and engaged with what I’m looking at. A good story is not an explanation or a vessel for meaning, it’s a collaboration between maker and viewer.

    photography Daniel Greer courtesy of the artist
    photography Daniel Greer courtesy of the artist

  • "As Above, So Below" - Klara Lilja and Royal Copenhagen create a dreamy universe with their new collaboration

    Written by Natalia Muntean

    “The idea comes from the French court in the 16th century, where they made platters that weren’t meant for eating but had various decorative elements on them. I really wanted my identity to be visible in these pieces, so even in 50 years, there would be no doubt about who made them,” says Danish sculptor Klara Lilja about ‘As Above, So Below’, her freshly launched collaboration with Royal Copenhagen.

    The imaginative collaboration marks the continuation of Royal Copenhagen's rich legacy of elevating artists, inviting them to share their unique interpretations of porcelain.Klara Lilja’s 25 platters delve into themes closely connected to nature. Each platter features 120 to 180 meticulously handcrafted details, creating an organic narrative that highlights flora and fauna.

    “My style is quite lush and wild, whereas Royal Copenhagen has a very perfectionistic approach. But common for us is that we value quality over quantity. The works we have created I’ve made as complex as I possibly could because I knew the porcelain factory’s craftsmen could handle it. I wanted to push them as well as myself,” says Klara Lilja.

    Each piece also incorporates historical references to Royal Copenhagen’s artistic heritage, with elements such as starfish, butterflies, snails, and flowers adding an enchanting dimension. The collection comprises three sections: Ocean, Land and Air, with each platter being unique.

    “From the very beginning, you could feel Klara’s genuine passion, and it’s been exciting to see how our craftsmen have been able to take her more daring expressions and create their version of them. Klara Lilja is clearly present in the pieces, but at the same time, they showcase our craftsmen’s exceptional skills,” says Jasper Toron Nielsen, Creative Director for Royal Copenhagen.

    Klara Lilja X Royal Copenhagen launched on the porcelain factory’s 250th anniversary, May 1st. The artworks will be displayed in Royal Copenhagen’s flagship store in Amagertorv in Copenhagen from May 2nd to the beginning of August 2025.

  • images courtesy of The Archives
    of Iria Leino Trust NY

    Stockholm Art Week: Iria Leino: An Interview With Darren Warner & Peter Hastings Falk

    Written by Natalia Muntean by Zohra Vanlerberghe

    The late Finnish-American artist Iria Leino (1932–2022) lived a life of radical reinvention, from a 1950s Parisian fashion icon to a reclusive New York painter whose vibrant abstractions remained hidden for decades. Now, her work is being rediscovered as a vital missing link in postwar abstraction, blending the intensity of the New York School with the depth of Buddhist philosophy. On the occasion of her dual presentations during Stockholm Art Week, at Market Art Fair and a solo takeover of the former Galerie Nordenhake space, Darren Warner, from Larsen Warner Gallery in Stockholm, and curator of the Iria Leino Trust in New York, Peter Hastings Falk, discuss her extraordinary legacy and life.

    Natalia Muntean: What inspired you to bring Iria Leino’s work into the spotlight now?

    Darren Warner:     Iria’s story is fascinating; she was born in Helsinki in 1932, moved to Paris around 1955 and became an iconic model for Christian Dior and Pierre Cardin. She abandoned acclaim in Paris to move to New York in 1964 to fulfil her lifelong desire to become an artist, working in near solitude for over 50 years. In her lifetime, Leino rarely engaged with galleries, instead, Leino opted for an existence devoted to her studio practice and her faith in Buddhism, and much like pioneering artists such as Hilma af Klint, saw her work as a means of spiritual enlightenment rather than a commercial endeavour. Leino’s experimentation and manipulation of acrylic pigments during the ’60s and ’70s is of particular significance; alongside her peers in the second wave of the New York School such as Helen Frankenthaler, Keneth Noland and Larry Poons, Leino was a pioneer in the development of a more lyrical abstraction, an antidote to the more gestural abstract expressionism that had come before. After she died in 2022, there were over 1000 paintings and works on paper left within her Soho loft; an extraordinary time capsule of works of exceptional quality that helps broaden the story of 20th century abstract painting in a powerful way.

    NM: Leino abandoned a successful modelling career for a secluded life of painting - how did this shift influence her artistic voice? How did her faith shape her creative process?

    Peter Hastings Falk:     Iria never intended to become reclusive. She wanted to be as much a star in the art world as she had become in the fashion and modelling world. While in New York, major dealers, such as the legendary Leo Castelli, visited her and liked her work very much but she was impatient about waiting in line and always wound up turning them off. Throughout her life, she battled many demons and struggled at times with bouts of bulimia and anorexia. She had countless boyfriends, and at least four of them proposed marriage to her but she rejected all of them. To her, men were like children, requiring too much work, and they would get in the way of her painting time. Iria was full of contradictions. But through her conversion to Buddhism in 1968, she found a consistent philosophy and a way to focus on her art. This allowed her to express herself authentically and compellingly, as she was not a follower of the New York Abstract Expressionist painters and not derivative of her more famous peers. Her use of colour and techniques often came to her from dreams, which she recorded consistently in her journals. Even the spiral sgraffito in her colour field paintings were not just decorative elements, they had deep life meanings.

    NM: Why did you choose to present the Colour Field and Buddhist Rain series, and what do they reveal about her evolution as an artist?

    DW:     In Leino’s work, you are swept into an ethereal world where the artist’s abstract manifestations skillfully capture the spiritual dimensions of our inner selves. Favouring the contemplative nature of pure colour and its sensuous immediacy over the spontaneous intensity of gestural abstraction, Leino dedicated several years to developing dozens of immersive colour fields and lyrically abstract paintings. The Colour Field and Buddhist Rain series are the first two collections that ignited Leino’s lifelong exploration of the viscosity of acrylic paint across various styles. Each series embodies key elements of Iria’s practice and serves as an ideal introduction to her extensive body of work, which includes many definitive series.

    NM: Why was Stockholm the right place to launch Leino’s work in Scandinavia, especially during Art Week?

    DW:     Iria had a long-held relationship with Sweden and Stockholm in particular. She had learned Swedish and made many Swedish connections through her time at the Swedish Girls School in Helsinki. Iria’s journals start in 1955 but she made many references to spending her summers working in Stockholm as a waitress, this would have been from around 1950 through to 1954. Market Art Fair and Stockholm Art Week provide a perfect platform to present Iria’s groundbreaking painting to a Swedish audience for the first time in nearly 50 years. Iria was included in the exhibition ‘Finsk bild: aktuell skulptur, måleri och grafik at Liljevalchs Konsthall in 1977 where she showed a selection of works from her Buddhist Rain series so the idea that we could present her work within the same space nearly 50 years later felt like a wonderful full circle moment. During this period, Stockholm emerges as a central hub for the broader Scandinavian art community. This makes it an ideal moment to pay tribute to and spotlight an important yet under-recognised Scandinavian painter, who we believe is one of the most significant Svandinavian artistic discoveries of the last 50 years.

    images courtesy of The Archives
    of Iria Leino Trust NY

Pages