After the Long Quiet

After a five-year pause, Marström returns with eighteen paintings made almost entirely at dawn.

The works gathered here were painted over eighteen months in the artist's studio outside Uppsala, most of them in the first hours of daylight. Marström describes the period as a deliberate slowing — fewer decisions, longer sittings, thinner layers built up over weeks. The graphite under-drawing is left visible at the edges of most canvases, a record of where the painting began before the colour arrived.

The result is a body of work that resists being taken in quickly. Seen in passing, the paintings read as quiet fields of grey and ochre. Given time, they open: a horizon resolves, a figure turns away, a window admits a little more light. This is the kind of looking the gallery was built for, and Marström's first show with us in six years rewards every minute you give it.