Nordic Art, from Folk Tradition to Now

Nordic art has always run on two currents at once: the folk tradition of pattern and ornament, and a newer instinct to pare everything back until shape does the work. Both are alive in this gallery. Ingunn Dybendal draws folk flowers and a patterned lakeland petal by petal in coloured pencil. Sia Siamos paints the Nordic table mid-meal, Simen Wahlqvist tells whole jokes in a handful of lines, Hedvig Wallin, the gallery's first Swede, draws a breakfast table with a naive artist's wonky perspective, Mikko Saarainen, the first Finn, crowds a comic page until every corner is doing something, and Ishtar Bäcklund Dakhil moves between Stockholm's waterfront and imagined worlds. All of them live and work in the Nordics.

What makes artwork Nordic isn't the subject; there's no rule that says lakes and birches. It's a habit the region's artists share: take something ordinary, a mug of flowers, a breakfast table, a morning stretch, and give it real weight. The pieces here sit on a line between the two ends of that tradition. Some lean towards folk pattern, every bloom a separate invention worked in coloured pencil; others are as contemporary as a confession painted across a cobalt head. One honest note: Nordic covers five countries, and our artists don't yet come from all of them. We'd rather be a small gallery that knows every piece it sells than a big one that's merely browsed them.