About
In the series SWEETISH, Beyene takes as his point of departure nineteenth-century Swedish painting and its influence on how Sweden has come to imagine itself. Artists such as Carl Larsson, Jenny Nyström, and Anders Zorn created images of everyday life, community, and national identity — from Midsummer celebrations and herring lunches to red wooden houses and summer landscapes. Beyene examines how these images continue to resonate today, and the tensions they carry within a contemporary Sweden in transition.
Through portraits and large-scale paintings of summery rituals, he portrays a Sweden often described as overly harmonious. His paintings contain both warmth and familiarity, but also an oversaturated idyll that begins to chafe. Light is central to the series: an intense yellow summer light permeates the paintings, dissolving the boundaries between people, landscapes, and traditions. The light draws the viewer in, yet simultaneously challenges the limits of the motifs.
Noah Beyene, born in 1993 in Stockholm to a Swedish mother and an Ethiopian father, holds a BFA from The Slade School of Fine Art in London, where he currently lives and works. He has previously exhibited at Addis Fine Art (London), Solito Gallery Naples, Bridge Gallery Paris/Seoul, and Annely Fine Art London.
