Sara-Vide Ericson: DRIFT

Liljevalchs konsthall is pleased to announce DRIFT, a major solo exhibition by Swedish painter Sara-Vide Ericson, opening in Stockholm on November 13. The exhibition brings together approximately eighty new works, all exhibited for the first time.

DRIFT begins in the Arctic Ocean, aboard the Swedish icebreaker Oden. In 2025, Sara-Vide Ericson joined the Canada-Sweden Arctic Ocean expedition, transforming a container on deck into a temporary studio. Over six weeks, she produced eighty paintings amid a landscape in constant flux. The expedition became both a material condition of painting and an inquiry into the shifting boundaries between body, environment, and perception.

DRIFT expands the field of painting through monumental canvases, installations, and geological material. Ericson approaches the Arctic as a terrain where geological time, sensory experience, and the limits of human control converge.

Among the materials incorporated into the works are seabed sediments collected through deep-sea drilling at a depth of 4,000 metres beneath the Arctic Ocean. Preserved in oxygen-deficient environments over millennia, these sediments hold traces of organic and geological histories. Dried and ground into pigment, they enter the paintings as matter, bringing geological time into contact with bodily experience. Through touch, scent, and taste, Ericson explores forms of perception that exceed visual representation, placing scientific measurement in tension with subjective, sensory knowledge.

In DRIFT, the body is a participant in a world of appetites, dependencies, and transformations. The title evokes movement without a fixed point of orientation, tracing unstable boundaries between control and vulnerability, presence and dissolution. Painting becomes a way of engaging with forces that cannot be fully known or controlled.

Sara-Vide Ericson has established herself as one of her generation’s most significant artists, exhibiting both in Sweden and internationally. In her figurative painting, personal experiences, mythical motifs and the sovereignty of nature are interwoven in intense and physical imagery. The practice emanates from a physical way of working, where presence, vulnerability and transformation are recurring themes. In DRIFT, these explorations are deepened through an encounter with a landscape that both carries and dissolves the human figure. Ericson was born in 1983 and lives and works in Hälsingland, Sweden.

The relationship with Sara-Vide Ericson was established through Stockholm Cosmologies, a curatorial project in which South African curator Storm Janse van Rensburg and Joanna Sandell Wright explored the historical and contemporary connections between the Swedish and South African art scenes, considering the impact of globalisation and solidarity movements over recent decades.

DRIFT is curated by Joanna Sandell Wright, Artistic Director of Liljevalchs. A richly illustrated catalogue, published by Ocean Books, accompanies the presentation.

Established in 1916, Liljevalchs konsthall is Sweden’s first independent public institution for contemporary art and one of Scandinavia’s largest. Rooted in Stockholm and internationally engaged, it develops a rich program of exhibitions, commissions, performance, experimentation, and international collaborations that engage with the urgencies and possibilities of the present. Through artistic experimentation and encounters across disciplines, Liljevalchs opens space for reflection, debate, and public exchange. The original building, designed by architect Carl Bergsten, and the Liljevalchs+ extension, designed by architect Gert Wingårdh and opened in 2021, offer distinct architectural settings for this evolving program.