Happenstance and found legacy
- C-print
- 3 days ago
- 9 min read
Speaking to Sarah von Sydow is a reminder of the detours and long-term commitment to an end game often necessary for an artist to anchor and find their proper footing and moment. "I took a significant detour to rebuild my life in Sweden: learning the language, figuring out how to pay the bills while sustaining a practice, integrating into a culture that wasn't mine. That was not a chill task, and I think we need to be very kind to people in that process," she says, enjoying the spotlight in the current exhibition Märklighet! at SKF/Konstnärshuset in Stockholm, where her work intersects with the forgotten and overlooked Gudrun Key-Åberg, who was ahead of her time, creating a full-circle moment in this union.
C-P: You studied art in New York City at a fairly young age. How did that time, and the city, leave a mark on your art today?
S.v.S: I arrived at the School of Visual Arts a few weeks after my eighteenth birthday, which in retrospect was an absurd age to be dropped into that city. While it was peak indie-sleaze era and the parties were phenomenal, the education at SVA was serious in ways I didn't fully grasp until much later. My teachers included Jack Whitten, Mary Heilmann, Peter Heinemann, who went to Black Mountain College and studied under Albers, Alice Aycock, and Judith Linhares. These people had been thinking hard about what art was for and weren't interested in giving any easy answers. It was very much still a tough-love teaching style. New York taught me that rigor and strangeness aren't opposites and that anything is possible, if you stay open to it. I moved there with a friend from high school, Sam Pinkleton, who convinced me to go. We had recently lost Prom King and Queen together and needed a fresh start. We also share a birthday, which felt like a sign. He knew New York was the only right place for us, and so off we went, arms proverbially hooked: him to study theater at NYU, me to study fine art at SVA. We explored those worlds independently and showed up for each other at intense moments: a collapsed lung, a serious bike accident, a great party, a terrifying crit. Sam came to SVA and took notes for me when I was getting reamed by professors because I never could remember what they said after—my memory erased by terror. I still have those notes, quotes from Jack and Alice, stapled into my sketchbook on paper from the Roundabout Theatre. I think that combination—joy and intensely hard work and facing terror and showing up for each other as inseparable things—is the mark New York left on me. I'm still drawing from it, albeit in a location where the cost of living is less debilitating. It was pretty clear to me when I was in NYC that not inheriting a loft in Soho was really going to set me back, that being able to afford time to work in the studio was not something that city’s prices would afford me. So it also taught me that my studio time was of extreme value, and I needed to be somewhere that could allow for me to have it—I’m talking economically.
C-P: What forms the points of departure for your work as a painter?
S.v.S: Humans have such an intense need to matter, to be included, to belong somewhere while still here. I am plagued by watching external forces decide what gets to exist and what doesn't: which futures count as valid, whose images count as serious, whose inner life is worth anything. Art is one of the few places that insists on a wider definition of what is allowed to be. Yet the history of whose art counts is its own version of the same narrowing. I want to make a rift in both at once. In tandem with that, for every insider artist I'm drawn to, I need to find a counterpart working outside the academies. Art history still runs on a serious shortage of women, but the coffers of vernacular image-making traditions are rife with them.
What keeps pulling me back are traditions at the edge of image-making and devotion: Pennsylvania Fraktur, theorem painting, emblem books, medieval textiles, allmoge. The mix of the strange and the rigorous. Delight and dedication. These traditions encoded serious beliefs about belonging and social order, dismissed as decorative because of who or where they were made. The same dynamic interests me on the fine art side: the Bentvueghels deliberately built a counter-institution, and the sottobosco painters in that orbit did something genuinely strange with natural forms. In 2026, you can't pick up these images without reckoning with what they carried. That complexity is where I try to stay when I work.
C-P: Your studio practice involves making still-life arrangements that later serve as models and inspiration for your paintings. What can be said about this method? S.v.S: It probably starts with my first pet, an earthworm named Queenie. I kept her in a very carefully curated habitat box. Later, working as an artist assistant in New York, I encountered another kind of box: my employers couldn't pay me, so instead they would ceremoniously open what they called their bijou box, a collection of vintage JPG jewelry from the nineties, and bequeath a piece unto me. A box can contain a whole world with its own magic rules, and that potential has delighted me my whole life. So has the forest floor, for the same reason: when you get low enough, down to moss and grass and mushroom level, an entirely different world opens up. Both are about scale and self-containment, about what becomes possible when you define the edges of a world and then crawl inside it. That obsession eventually led me to dioramas, and from there to finding out that Poussin used the same basic logic: small stage sets to work out composition and light before painting. Something clicked: my love of the magical box, the miniature, and what I wanted to do in painting suddenly belonged together.
What I build in my boxes isn't real, and I'm not really painting a still life: I'm painting the negotiation between memory and experience of something I've seen. That negotiation needs a physical form, something I can encounter again and let real light move across. Building it convinces me of the realness of my own perception, that what I saw and felt is worthy of painting. I hope that conviction carries into the work. But the model only takes me so far. At a certain point, the painting takes over and tells me what to do. The whole process is a series of encounters: something seen, remade as something tangible, then allowed to dissolve into the demands of the painting again.
C-P: You are showing in the exhibition Märklighet!, where an uncanny kinship between you and the late, visionary painter Gudrun Key-Åberg is highlighted. You've mentioned the discovery of Gudrun's work feeling like a relief. Can you elaborate?
S.v.S: Relief is the right word, but the first feeling was actually enchantment. Then suspicion. How on earth could we be so similar? Gudrun has the same reference points as me: embroidery, printed patterns on textiles, the atomic level, a repulsion toward making artifice instead of art, and what I can only describe as a constant safety check that our paintings are meeting the criteria of non-compliance. Painting is one of the most entrenched practices there is, hardly the most cutting-edge way of working, which means that safety check has to work overtime. You have to keep asking whether you're genuinely doing something or just filling a very old, very comfortable container. The current checklist I’ve adapted is actually from the dance world, called The 9 Pillars of Contemporary Performance Scenes, penned by the legendary Tilman O’Donnell.Anyway, I racked my brain. Is there any way I could have seen her work before? Before teaching, I had a terrifically entertaining day job pricing oddities at a vintage furniture and decor shop, spending lots of time on auction houses' online archives. Could I have stumbled across her there? But the timelines didn't sync, and the works listed at auction during my employment were less remarkable prints rather than her wilder, juicier paintings.
She died in 1982. I was born in 1987. Fellow artist Niklas Alriksson joked that I am her second coming, and his joke kind of freaks me out. Our paintings are so uncannily aligned, and I ended up emigrating to Sweden in my early twenties to be in a relationship with the grandson of Gudrun's best friend, something I only discovered in conversation with the staff at SKF/Konstnärshuset just days before my paintings were delivered for install. The whole thing is a little eerie. But finding her was evidence that what I'm doing is possible. She had already done the hard thing of refusing both options—naive or ironic—and built her own visual system with complete seriousness, across decades. Gudrun makes it feel less lonely.
C-P: What are you presenting in the exhibition, where you also exhibit alongside Astrid Bäckström? S.v.S: Four paintings—all newly produced for this exhibition. When I was approached about the show, I knew immediately that I wanted to make fresh work for it, which was a bit of a gamble given the timeline, as oil on linen is not exactly a fast medium. But that felt very exciting. I also produced the duotone, risograph-printed zine and one of the texts in it. Astrid's textile work and my paintings don't depict the same things, but they're circling the same territory: what does an inherited visual language contain that its inheritors have to rediscover? Working alongside her has made that question more specific for me. And I've been genuinely moved to hear from people who have seen the show that they feel the work heightens each other. That's what you want as an artist: to lift and be lifted. You get out into other people's studios, you look hard at what they're doing, and sometimes something clicks that neither of you could have arrived at alone. There is a particular kind of feminist joy in that, in work that doesn't compete but compounds.
C-P: What do you make of the local art scene, and what has been catching your interest more recently?
S.v.S: I would like to bury the hatchet that is the self-flagellation over the Stockholm art scene. Yes, we are a few million people short of New York or LA. But I don’t miss the dog-eat-dog energy: everyone in America hustles on a level that makes financial precarity, competition, and ego the air you breathe rather than problems you solve. What we have here is a scene you can actually navigate: put in the time and you can meet everyone in it. The DIY scene is just you and five of your friends—go nuts. At the same time, real estate is crushing everyone, even Swedish institutions: Moderna, ArkDes. The scrappy ones too. Politicians lower the food tax and do PR for grocery chains in Lidl uniforms. They want us to think of ourselves as individuals at the mercy of the market and are replacing serious culture with trite, entertainment-oriented products. There are forces actively working to dissolve the collective on every level. It is a trap. Those of us who understand that art is in service to people have a responsibility to keep making that case, loudly, with good work and a straight face. Lay down your minor beefs, for the time has come, y’all.
For this interview, I sat down and wrote out the regional painters I'm excited about. The list was long. I’m equally excited by handcraft traditions landing in their rightful place in the art world. Märklighet! at SKF/Konstnärshuset is doing that. I think of fiber artist Anna Nordström, and Jesper Bror Palmqvist, whose paintings cross folk cultures in stunning ways. The lines between categories feel looser and more open. And there is room for more of us—when everyone’s an artist, art will be everywhere. To anyone reading this: we are recruiting. Join us. You, too, can have fun.
C-P: What's next for you this year? S.v.S: A research trip to the Netherlands, to spend time with the Dutch Golden Age botanical painters and the counter-institutional energy of the Bentvueghels. I've also applied to several residencies for the summer. My backup plan is a mycology course so I can spend some time slithering around on the forest floor. I never want to stop seeing, learning, identifying, naming. What’s really next for me is the continuation of the longer game.
I took a significant detour to rebuild my life in Sweden: learning the language, figuring out how to pay the bills while sustaining a practice, integrating into a culture that wasn't mine. That was not a chill task, and I think we need to be very kind to people in that process. It takes years, and it costs something real. So in that detoured sense, I consider myself still a young painter at thirty-eight. I have decades of work ahead of me, and that's what gets me out of bed in the morning—I have a lot to do in the studio. I’ve just started a new series of twelve paintings. The ideas are queuing up: they’re impatient, fun, weird, and a little demanding. They’re clowning a bit with me, and some gardening needs to be done, you know, a steady amount of continuous care instead of alla prima. And as always, tending what grows with wonder.
Ashik Zaman