Willem Andersson b. 1980

Willem Andersson was born in Helsinki, Finland.

Lives and works in Virrestad, Sweden.

Andersson works with painting and sculpture, in a way that is ever-changing and evolving. Refusing to be stagnant and to have an easily recognizable style, Andersson, who is mainly self-taught as an artist, have worked with paintings as almost mental diary notes, reflecting his personal life and family history, to abstracting parts of the paintings into sculptures in wood, metal and 3D-printing. 

In the last years, Andersson has returned to painting, after focusing on sculpture, and to critical acclaim he lets his way of painting be influenced by various sources, such as digital sketching, films, history of ideas and art history. The artist himself touched upon the mix of sources and styles and its mechanics in the exhibition title from his solo exhibition at Belenius in 2023 ­– I Take the Words of One Language, I Put Them into the Blender of My Head. The language, one guesses, is the language of art or maybe of seeing or the act of painting. In the, often monumental, paintings, the subject seems to be seeing, or watching. In what appears like stages, or movie sets, the viewer is watching others, gazing at art works in galleries, at windows, away from the viewer of the painting. The character, the depicted viewer in Andersson’s elaborate stage sets, is a timeless creature, sometimes dressed in contemporary garments, sometimes dressed in art deco style attire, but always in some ways twisted and distorted, reminiscent of something familiar, but at the same time eerie, unheimlich, to borrow terminology from Jentsch and Freud. 

Maybe it is all an allegory, of how the viewer, or the artist, can never quite grasp the true essence of art. How we are always trying to extract the meaning, the truth of an artwork and thus rob it of its essence, the alluring qualities we are drawn to, and the same time frustrated by. Andersson and the viewer of his works can revel in the frustration and desire that art creates, without the success and ensuing disappointment of being able to decode the paintings.

Willem Andersson has worked with Belenius since the gallery’s opening in 2006. He is represented in many prestigious private collections and in the Swedish Public Art Agency collection. Solo shows include Nancy Margolis in New York and Sotheby’s Stockholm, apart from recurring solos at Belenius. Andersson will soon make his debut solo show in Finland (TBA).