Women in surrealism are experiencing a renaissance, posthumously receiving major exhibitions and market attention albeit decades after their male counterparts. Perhaps exemplified by last summer’s Venice Biennale, called The Milk of Dreams for Leonora Carrington and showcasing female surrealists amongst contemporary participants, these artists’ legacies are finally gaining exposure.
It is of no surprise that there is a new generation of surrealist-oriented, female painters coming to the fore, whose explorations of femininity and fertility exhibit clear influence from these overlooked but pioneering 20th century artists. One such painter is Camilla Engstrom, an up-and-coming Scandinavian artist whose dreamy, feminist oeuvre is attracting international attention.
Engström was born in Örebro, Sweden in 1989 and now works between Sweden and Los Angeles. She is a self-taught painter, having studied at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. After graduating in 2012, Engström worked as a fashion assistant, but soon left to be a full-time artist after finding success on Instagram with her drawings of her voluptuous alter ego. Called ‘Husa’, she is a pink, nude, goddess-like character, ironically named for the Swedish word for housewife.
Engström’s work looks to praise Mother Nature and the natural world, as well as the female form and its fecundity. This is most evident in her work Guldflod (2021), where the life-giving sun takes the form of a breast, milk pouring from it into a valley. Engström’s almost anthropomorphised vision of landscape is reminiscent of British surrealist Ithell Colquhoun, while her interest in magical realism and exploration of the self and the body bring to mind one of most well-known surrealists, Frida Kahlo. The artist also has a daily meditation practice which feeds into her work, recalling the fascination with the subconscious that epitomised the Surrealist movement.
Engström uses a saturated, psychedelic colour palette to fill the undulating forms on her canvases. The artist has referred to American modernist Georgia O’Keefe’s erotically charged flowers and landscapes as a major influence. She has also noted inspiration from fellow Swedish artist Hilma Af Klimt, whose automatic drawings were a precursor to those popularised by the Surrealists and whose legacy has gained significant traction in recent years.
Engström’s vibrant, sensual dreamscapes earned her a 2023 residency at Carl Kostyál’s Swedish island outpost on Bildö, and she is now represented by the gallery as well. Engström has enjoyed solo exhibitions as far afield as Bangkok, Hong Kong, Berlin, Stockholm, Los Angeles, and New York. Her paintings and prints have also burst onto the auction market in the last year, achieving her current record of 450,000 HKD, or nearly £50,000 for Love Tastes Delicious (2020) at Christie’s Hong Kong.
Camilla Engström is evidently following in the footsteps of the pioneering women who came before her in a feminist history of painting and drawing. While paying homage to her inspirations, she incorporates contemporary anxieties and ideas in her imagined landscapes and bountiful still lives, from body image and selfhood to female sexuality and desire, perhaps conceiving a new surrealism for the 21st century.