Emma Bjurström: Painting as Controlled Loss

Between familiarity and deformation

Emma Bjurström – Painting

Emma Bjurström is a Swedish painter born in 1986, living and working in Virrestad. Her practice is rooted in painting, but driven less by representation than by shifts in perception. Working primarily in oil on canvas, she positions painting as a site where familiarity begins to slip, where motifs drawn from cultural memory lose their stability without disappearing entirely.

Bjurström often starts from a clear sketch or historical reference, then allows the image to dissolve through intuitive improvisation. Older painting traditions, archival objects, and everyday materials are scaled, fragmented, and reassembled until they hover between recognition and uncertainty. The paintings do not narrate history, they register erosion. Loss appears not as drama, but as a quiet structural condition. Motifs are stretched, folded, or partially erased, suggesting time as a force that deforms rather than concludes.

In recent works, Bjurström incorporates digitally processed documentation of objects from her immediate surroundings. These objects are treated not as neutral forms, but as carriers of projected value and collective agreement. The tension between shared perception and personal distance becomes central. Her painting operates within this gap, producing a restrained form of magical realism grounded in material decisions rather than symbolism artist statement.

Bjurström has exhibited with****Belenius Gallery in Stockholm and Lamb Gallery , among others. Her work resists narrative clarity, insisting instead on painting as a place where time, memory, and form remain unresolved.

Emma Bjurström on Instagram

Emma Bjurström - Artist Studio Impressions Image provided by the artist(left) Emma Bjurström (right)Photo: Willem Anderson Image Courtesy and provided by the artist

Emma Bjurström -"Preludium" from the exhibition Someone else is breathing View Belenius Gallery Images courtesy of the artist and Belenius -> Photo: Jean-Baptiste Béranger - Image Courtesy and provided by the artist and gallery

Emma Bjurström(left) "Preludium" - (right) "Imprinted vectors" from the exhibition Everything Except Itself - Photo Willem Andersson Image Courtesy and provided by the artist and gallery Photo Willem Andersson

Emma Bjurström: "Someone else is breathing" (same as the exhibition name) - (right) "Can Can Circles" from the exhibition Absentminded deformation. Image Courtesy and provided by the artist and gallery - Photo Willem Andersson

Emma Bjurström "Can Can Circles" and the other big one- "Chasing Lesley". From Absentminded deformation - Photo Jean-Baptiste Béranger Image Courtesy and provided by the artist and galleryEmma Bjurström Absentminded deformation - Belenius Gallery - Exhibition - Image Courtesy and provided by the artist and galleryEmma Bjurström Timber and Stone Act of Tin Pants Artifact. Image Courtesy and provided by the artist and galleryEmma Bjurström Someone else is Breathing Photo - Belenius Gallery -> Jean-Baptiste Béranger - Image Courtesy and provided by the artist and galleryEmma Bjurström - ”Everything Except Itself” - Belenius Gallery Photo: Ellinor Hall - Image Courtesy and provided by the artist and galleryEmma Bjurström - Everything Except Itself - Belenius Gallery . Image Courtesy and provided by the artist and gallery

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