“Behind the Story”, ink and watercolor on paper,   300×350 cm

Tobey Fine Arts is very pleased to announce Behind the Story, new paintings by Swedish artist Susann Brännström. In her first solo exhibition with ‘Tobey Fine Arts, on view will be a grouping of large-scaled, mixed-media paintings on paper consisting of what the artist calls “code pieces” or linguistic fragments. While remaining free of traditional expectations, these works make use of a simple construct where color, form, and composition become their three most important elements. Avoiding formalism through a breakdown of the painter’s idiom, the result becomes a merging of different pictorial structures with nontraditional painting styles that open up exciting new worlds of meaning. Ms. Brännstrom’s diverse background has brought her into close contact with a wide-range of contemporary culture; ranging from teaching abstract painting in China to creating public commissions in her home country of Sweden, where her work has also been simultaneously embraced by the skateboard youth culture who, because of her breaking down of formal and traditionalist elements, regard her as an anarchistic graffiti artist.

She states: “I am not trying to abandon the images of [abstract] painting, instead I use them as a sort of visual ‘sampling’. My intention is to dislodge previous meanings, to make the contemporary possible.” Susann Brännström was born in Sweden in 1956 and graduated from the Royal Art Academy in Stockholm. She has exhibited widely internationally and her solo exhibitions include the Östersund Art Museum, Sweden, and most recently Xianamen University in China in 2005. Her works are part of the permanent collection of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and she has completed several public commissions for the city of Stockholm. She currently resides and works in Stockholm, Sweden.