Rebecca Lindsmyr is a Swedish-born artist who first caught our attention in a group exhibition in our hometown of Uppsala back in 2019, and have been on our radar ever since. Today, Rebecca holds a MFA degree from Malmö Art Academy, is represented by Danish powerhouse Nils Staerk where she's set to present her second solo exhibition later in the year, and is just in the process of moving to Paris following a residency at Cité internationale des arts in 2023/2024. Rebecca's trajectory to date feels very telling of the kind of artists that she is. Also, to our great delight, she just happens to be one of the four artists in the group show Shi Shi Chi Chi that we are curating at Belenius in Stockholm opening on March 27, 2025.
C-P: Hi Rebecca, I'm so happy to be working with you for our next project at Belenius. I first saw your work in a group exhibition back in 2019 in my hometown of Uppsala of all places. I've followed you ever since and it's been great to monitor your progress as an artist from a distance. First of all, congrats on all your recent success.
R.L: Hi, and thank you! I’m glad to have been invited – to the show and this interview! It’s been such a generous process.
C-P: Before diving into the present; let's just take a moment to rewind. Your trajectory as a Swedish-born artist is a little different from most. Born in Edsbyn, you went to Glasgow School of Art for your BFA and some years later pursued a MFA at Malmö Art Academy. Run me through your foundational years and what drew you to fine art in the first place.
R.L: I come from a crafty background, but not at all from art. I’m from the countryside, my parents and relatives always did a lot of things with their hands, my grandmother painted, but no one knew much about art or introduced it to me. I was almost already in my twenties before I first saw a contemporary art exhibition, and even though I wished early on to be an artist, it took strangely long to understand one could.
After high school, I needed a study break and found a prep-school in sewing/fashion, but soon switched to art when I figured that was an option. Suddenly I’d mishapped into the right place. It was in Gävle. For me this was the perfect first school. I knew way less about art than some of my peers, but we were mainly just a curious bunch of newcomers trying to figure art – and our lives – out together. I wouldn’t allow myself to fully go for it, didn’t take out any student loans, I rather worked more or less full-time in the nights and weekends at a grocery store, trying to prove I could do it all. During the school breaks, I went on tours in Europe – booked cheap buses or flights and stayed in hostel dorms to see lots of art. That was my crash course.
When those years came to an end, I applied to academies in the UK. I dreamt of a class focused on painting and was looking at a lot of British painters at the time. I feel like I’m coming from another generation saying this, but the UK felt like the thing back then. I carried my massive physical portfolio around the country for 2 weeks for interviews, ended up choosing between Slade and Glasgow – and picked the latter. London felt too saturated, and Glasgow with its working-class mentality rather manageable. Even that turned out to be intense – big classes, lots of people, a new culture, grading system, adjusting to academic English and reading philosophy. I also vividly remember my chin drop during intro on the first day – I didn’t understand a word of the Scottish accent! It was a great experience. After my graduation, I left the UK – less than a week after the Brexit vote – and lived a few years in Germany before coming back to Sweden for my Masters. This was the period when I started switching from figurative to abstract painting, and focused in depth on broadening my theory – while being introduced to yet another scene.
C-P: You are just about to relocate to Paris, following a residency at Cité internationale des arts in 2023/2024. What are some of the considerations that went into this decision?
R.L: Since diving headfirst into art I’ve had a strong drive to understand the bigger picture, and get a sense of different viewpoints. I’ve a great interest in the History of Ideas as a field of study; how time and context affect individuals on a deeper level, and the other way around. Talking about this, I just studied a course on the intellectual history of emotions; a deep-dive into how even the most private is governed by time and context. In another scenario, one’s emotions would have been felt and defined differently, which is such a crazy thing to try to wrap one’s head around.
I’m drifting, I know. But I’ll still take a de-tour on the road to Paris, connecting the above. I’m very into psychology and psychoanalytic theory – ideas about the self, and how our surroundings are forcing its way in – penetrating it. Sorry for my slightly violent take. Anyway, this self, this subject, is constantly being negotiated – it’s plastic, layered. Freud considered the unconscious to be situated inside the subject - embedded below the layers of the conscious and preconscious – while Lacan described it to be situated outside, structured like a language. This said, the layering of the subject is a negotiation, a never-ending one of course. A means of trying to make sense. Today I feel this ‘in-to-out’ or ‘out-to-in’ is under lots of pressure – I’m thinking of, for example, certain men in power being manipulative to such extremes, clouding disposition. However, I’m spending a lot of time thinking about layers. You remember this internet thing about the Roman Empire? Suggesting men think about it very often. I’m not prone to gendering, but this is probably my Roman Empire, something strange I keep on thinking about: the layerings of subjects. How things are being forced in, or let out, in different entangled mechanisms. For me painting can explore this better than any other artistic medium. It’s a layered thought process. It’s an object as much as a subject – and an abject. It’s flat, it’s literally a border – it insists on being this border while simultaneously dismantling it. In Kristeva's writings, this is part of the definition of an abject.
Finally coming back to Paris, I think understanding the bigger picture is the thing – and being restless. I moved a lot as a kid, always between small places. Moving was a way for my parents to build their careers, to make space for social mobility. Still today, they are as restless as I’ve become. I’m glad to have inherited this side, even though I expect it to make me a slippery person in the eyes of some. But I guess it suits my medium.
By now you can probably tell why Paris is relevant on many levels. The city has this whole history of psychoanalysis, psychiatry, structuralist and post-structuralist theory – it’s so much about power and language and violence and resistance. On the other hand, it’s also a city of old money, intelligentsia and beauty. But it has a charge that I’m drawn to. And of course, Paris is having a moment in the arts now. The stars align, to put it short! I also have a strong gut feeling about being in a city with such a long history of believing in the capacity of culture and of raising your voice – in times when the world seems to be burning and heading fast towards culture-cuts and rearmament. In my teenage years and early twenties, I studied French and went to Paris for exchange. Being young and having read like two classics and barely spent time in cities, Paris was of course terrifying. Now I feel ready for it – 15 years later!
C-P: I get the impression that you are one of those artists who really enjoys going to shows. For instance, when you were in NYC some time ago, you saw about a gazillion shows. Who are some of the artists that have been an inspiration for you?
R.L: It’s important for me to have this dialogue – to see shows to know what is going on and what other artists are doing and thinking about. It’s also this History of Ideas perspective I guess – we’re in continuous process of writing history, and art is an expression of this. When it comes to New York, my partner Emil started working for the artist Lena Henke, and both of us went for 6 months. It was an important period. I did research, writing and reading, but a lot of it was about seeing and getting a feel of the scene for an extended period. It was a luxury; I wish for every artist to have such an opportunity.
I’ve gone through so many different periods with this; different artists speaking to different identities, needs, states and challenges in my own life or practice. But I tend to be drawn to psychologically charged work. I’m very unromantic when it comes to art. I think it comes from not taking art for granted – I want to feel something overpowering and uncomfortable. That there is some level of risk-taking involved. I recently went through some papers for the move and found something artist Sara-Vide Ericson wrote about me many years ago. She described me in my foundation years, when she was my guest teacher: "You were a second-year student and once inside your studio you fixed your icy wolf gaze on me and I thought, what is this brute force inside? It's someone who will get out, who has a hard shell, but there's a fire inside. (...) She has a drive and such an inherent power, an inner conviction and she will live for it." Sara is an impressive artist, and hearing this at an early stage was crucial. I feel it says something both about me as an artist and what I’m generally drawn to – even though I’m laughing out loud about the wolf thing! I worked for Sara for a few years. The explosive power that she saw is something that we share, and that I admire in her. She as a person and artist has been very important to me – and the note is a reminder.
When it comes to painting, my closest dialogues are at the very moment taking place with the work of Laura Owens, Jacqueline Humphries, Rebecca Morris, Monika Baer and Cy Twombly. And I love the complex restlessness of Charlene von Heyl! Much of it relates to some kind of dense play of release and withhold, or to picking things to pieces.
C-P: I’m not sure how open you are to talk about it, but I’m a little curious to ask you about the “artist couple dynamic” between you and your partner Emil Sandström?
R.L: Of course, it’s central. We met at the academy. After school we’ve tried to curate our lives to fit our needs – both as a couple and as artists. We decided early on that we wanted to leave Malmö after school, but also to keep one foot in the city – I value being part of the Malmö scene. Then things unfolded quickly; before he’d graduated the year after me, I’d started working with Nils Staerk, and New York became a reality while my first solo show was still up. Just before we left for the US, I received a spot at the Cité starting only one week after we would be returning home. It was crazy times. Now, we’ve been back in Malmö for some months, before returning to Paris. It’s a bliss sharing all of this. We’ve also done a few shows together, residencies in Denmark and Bulgaria, and a publication project with artist’s writings.
We keep a very tight dialogue. We’re always talking about art, sometimes it gets a bit much. But we also both love it – talking about what's going on in the art world, going to shows, traveling for shows, and being in the practices of friends and colleagues. I think we both also have the tendency of turning many friendships into working relations or working relations into friendships. It’s a way of life.
Our practices are very different, which is probably important. He’s more rigid and conceptual – and clean I’m more emotional, explosive and messy. But we share a strong interest in complexity and abstraction, in overthinking, and to a large extent like the same artists, even though we have our own "stars". We’ve learnt from experience that we shouldn’t share the same workspace for too long, and sometimes we just have to make fun of each other’s interests – like how everything boils down to psychoanalysis for one and economy for the other. We’re both pushers in a sense, curious about it all. I think that helps.
C-P: While your most recent body of works mainly consists of abstract paintings, you're also a very accomplished figurative painter, and were even back in 2019. Tell me a little about your current rapport with this dichotomy.
R.L: I’ve come to realize that I’m not so interested in the image or the process of depiction – but more in language, energies and thought processes. I don’t need the object anymore; the painting itself is the object, while also suggesting being both a subject and a border. I feel objects are a bit too fluid to even try to catch or pin them down. In removing the process of depiction, I find it easier to look at structures, at inner workings, at language. It broadens abstract thinking, and for me gets closer to the core. This way painting can be about identification, more than about looking out onto something. About performativity and power, plasticity and negotiation – about the intake or expulsion of language which results in the formation of a mass. This is also my motivation for working with the slim and low hung format: it underlines the potentially sculptural or subjective qualities of painting. Disrupts the idea of image. These subjective qualities go hand in hand with the whole idea of indexicality in painting – as discussed at length, by Isabelle Graw in her books on painting. It’s all a push and pull between the material impression of the (prelinguistic) gesture and established language – between the semiotic and the symbolic.
That said, when I worked with figuration, I always depicted a person – or an object suggested to act as subject – not really any scenery. Over time I felt the limits of figuration, and gradually dismantled it. My work became less literal this way. But I did figurative work recently, and I’m not saying I’m over it, but it must play the role of abstraction to make sense within my practice. Somehow playing with not actually being the object you think you see. I recently watched a video with Laura Owens, where she described how even when she uses figuration, she uses it to paint in the abstract. Jacqueline Humphries is doing something similar, throwing a smiley face into her painting; in a podcast interview, she comments "I’m an abstract painter, that’s not supposed to happen" making fun of herself, an identity and the idea of a rigid separation between the two approaches. I really like it when a seemingly figurative element can play a similar role. There are elements in some of my upcoming paintings that play with this – they are gestures but painted with a figurative approach. Here figuration becomes a means of translation or revisiting time, but visually the figuration is playing the role of gesture. A tiny teaser for what to come.
C-P: For our show, you'll be presenting one new painting in the larger format, something we agreed on quite early on. While I have yet to see it in person (it should be on its way to Stockholm as we speak), it's been a joy to follow the process. Would you like to share some words about it, and also your painting process in general which informs several layers of paint?
R.L: I could actually tap back into the figurative from another angle here. Something I’m still carrying with me from figuration is thinking through classical glazing techniques; to build something from the inside out – undertones first, and layering towards an outer surface. Today I use it to think conceptually and processually around abstraction. A few years ago, I was quite obsessed with Didier Anzieu’s the skin ego– it’s quite a playful idea comparing the layering of human consciousness with the layering of skin. It’s a mindbender, but the idea also has its limitations. However, painting is never one sole surface for me, it’s more like an onion – it’s time and dialogue turned mass. You can never really see it all at once, and when you grasp something and start pulling, you entangle something else. It’s a chain of connected thoughts – like the mind in dreams. It’s slips and repressions, symptoms and displacements. This is also something I’m drawn to in overpainting a full surface in semi-transparent layers, like I often do. Things change colour and they morph. Something from a lower layer arises and becomes visible, or what just was black has suddenly turned blue. Painting like this is of course often an emotional hell, because you can never plan, but that’s also why painting doesn't have much to do with imagery for me – it’s a chain of events. Like a conversation. It’s an intertextuality and body.
I rarely share process images. Because an early image might have very little to say about the final result. But this time, for this show and with you, I did. My process doesn’t build towards an image – searching for the object and moving closer. It’s a back-and-forth dialogue which forms a final whole. I like coming back to the same format due to this. Sometimes I play around with thinking about them all as the same. It’s just a slippery shapeshifter and at some time you just stop. Then the conversation continues somewhere else. It’s a temporal fragment. At the time of establishing the size of my stretchers years ago, I thought a lot about the size of a human flattened out, like the total mass of our skin. It’s quite a morbid thought, but it’s apparently on average 2m2. I don’t know who counted. Enlarge that slightly and you have something large enough to hug and hold you, with love and care or violence.
C-P: You've entitled said painting we’ll analyze at breakfast. So intriguing! As someone who's very amused by words, I'd like to know what role you assign titles in your practice.
R.L: For a long time, I’ve worked serially and picked one title for a group – then worked with numbering from there. Because, as mentioned, it’s the reworking of the same thing somehow, variations, altered repetition. But lately I’ve been so tired of numbering my works. The painting for this show marks a slightly new approach to titles. This year I will show quite a lot of new works, and this painting has become a bridge between different approaches.
What I want from the titles is for them to have a bigger function in my practice and reflect the process, my intertextual approach to gestures. Therefore, I’m keeping a transforming list of potential titles, which I have a continuous dialogue with. Small quotes from books, or things I’ve read or heard elsewhere. All somehow reflecting these psychological processes of negotiating an idea of self.
C-P: I also get the impression that you are an avid reader so I'm curious to know what you might have on your bed stand right now.
R.L: I’m a big reader and writer, always have been. It’s a central aspect of my practice, more than drawing or alike. When I came to Glasgow for my BA this caused quite some problems – as sketchbooks are supposed to be kept, shown, and graded. Here, one was expected to log one’s visual input – and mine were just piles of cheap ruled notepads filled with text. I always used to identify as a "good student". I even got this scholarship from graduating with the highest grade in my high school – this despite choosing language as my major, as someone who struggled a lot with language and wanted to get better. I probably don’t have to say I didn’t graduate with a big A from Glasgow. I think this anecdote says a lot about my practice.
I’m the cross-reading type of person and always have like 5 to 15 books that I read simultaneously. Different genres and topics. It’s generally quite hard for me to travel with less than 3 books. It’s an emotional thing. If I read one book, I get curious about synergies with another one and switch. Right now, I’m reading De äter ur din hand, baby by Elis Monteverde Burrau, Plasticity: The Promise of Explosion by Catherine Malabou, Posthuman knowledge by Rosi Braidotti, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection by Judith Butler, and Rich Texts: Selected Writing for Art by John Kelsey. Some are re-reads and some first-reads, and some have tagged along for a while – that’s the downside to being a cross-reader; it might take long to reach the end. For the move now me and Emil just packed and catalogued our books. We’ve both been struggling with bringing only one box of them each to Paris. Honestly, I get quite stressed by being without a pile of books, I always think through them. Oftentimes, I read daily, in the mornings, but it can also be enough just to see them, to get a process going.
C-P: Aside from our show, you're very much in the process of preparing your next solo exhibition at Danish powerhouse gallery Nils Staerk. How's that coming along and what could you share about this new body of work?
R.L: I’m very excited about this new group of works. I’ve already spent quite some time with them. Of course, I’m disrupting the process a bit by moving half-way through, but I’m also quite excited to see how that will affect the work. When writing this, I’m just about to finish some of the first works for the show. I’ll then take a short break from painting before continuing to build the group in Paris. So, I will have this long-distance relationship with some of the works, and then see them again fresh-eyed just before the show. The group is already quite diverse and complex, and I only expect this aspect to broaden along the way.
C.P: Lastly, what else might be coming up on the horizon?
R.L: Right now, the solo and the move is where my head is at, but there will also be a few fairs coming up that I’m excited about. At some unexpected moment in the coming months there will also be a group show popping up in the Öresund area – something I’ve been working on with a group of friends.