Galerie Nordenhake's Focus series turns to a painter who would have turned one hundred this year. A new presentation of work by Torsten Andersson opened in Stockholm on 23 October, the latest in the gallery's sequence of concentrated single-artist displays. The Focus format, which the gallery has run since at least 2018, gives a single artist or a single group of works a short, sharp showing alongside its main programme. Andersson, who died in 2009, remains one of Sweden's most influential modern painters, and the show coincides with a wider reassessment of his work in 2026.

Andersson painted in large format, filling his canvases with distinct, free-standing forms that read almost as depictions of sculptures. His pictures carry a weight that critics have traced to the physical, near-sculptural quality of the paint, and to the landscape of southern Sweden that anchored his choices, a heaviness of the ground felt as an inner quality. For all their seriousness, the paintings also hold what the gallery describes as an exhilarating joy and a sense of space.

Born in 1926 in Ostra Sallerup, Andersson began exhibiting in the 1950s and in 1960 became the youngest professor at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, a post he held until 1966. He showed at the Sao Paulo Biennial in 1959 and 1983 and at the 32nd Venice Biennale in 1964, and retrospectives followed at Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 1986 and Malmo Konsthall in 1987. This year his work was the subject of Sprakets tyngd at Marabouparken konsthall in Sundbyberg, and recent exhibitions have also been held at Dalslands konstmuseum, STANDARD in Oslo and Galerie Nordenhake itself.