Carl Kostyál is pleased to present ‘Två Hjärtan [Two Hearts]’, Swedish-born, LA-based artist Camilla Engström’s ninth solo exhibition with the gallery and her first at Hospitalet since 2022.
“Returning to the newly restored historic site marks a deeply resonant moment for the artist. In the years since her debut here, Engström has brought her vibrant, intuitive practice to an international stage. Now, carrying new life and ahead of a planned hiatus, she offers a body of work distilled to its most essential forms: flowers, seeds, roots, and the unseen currents that bind them.
These paintings chart a terrain where distinctions dissolve. Above and below ground, interior and exterior, body and bloom—each slips into the other, forming a continuum of energy like the flow of a river. Roots twist into petals, seeds nest within blossoms, and soil seems to breathe into sky. As in life, and acutely in the experience of pregnancy, transformation moves in both directions. It is not only the person who never steps into the same river twice; the river itself is altered by the encounter.
The shift from Engström’s expansive landscapes in her earlier NOMAD Circle works to the focused imagery here is striking. Canvases such as ‘Life Together’ arc into the form of a womb, holding space for both vulnerability and change, while ‘Blue Womb’ and ‘En Kropp [One Body]’ enclose a seed in the “belly” of a flower, recalling the quiet curl of a developing child. Painted in rhythm with her daily negotiations with new life, these works carry both the physical and emotional tempo of their making.
This dissolution of boundaries situates Engström in a lineage of artists who fused organic form with spiritual inquiry. Her pared-down compositions and curvilinear structures recall the visionary diagrams of fellow Swede Hilma af Klint, whose Nature Studies sought “what stands behind the flowers.” Like af Klint, Engström treats the floral motif not as decoration but as revelation, a threshold between the visible and the unseen. Some blossoms are rooted in memory, like the poppies she first encountered blazing across Gotland’s spring landscape; others are imagined hybrids, part plant, part human, part dream.
Echoes of Georgia O’Keeffe’s magnified sensuality, Tarsila do Amaral’s biomorphic surrealism, Luchita Hurtado’s bodily terrains, and Leonora Carrington’s metamorphic visions surface in her practice. Yet it is af Klint’s conviction—that close attention to the plant kingdom offers insight into our own being—that resonates most strongly here. Engström’s compositions hover between observation and invention, opening portals to the liminal space between waking and the subconscious.
Water recurs as both subject and method. For Engström, painting is akin to dance: her body moves slowly across the canvas, shaping fluid gestures that retain their sense of motion even when fixed in pigment. Working in oils, she embraces the medium’s slow drying time, reworking forms for hours before committing with a sense of inevitability. Pregnancy has altered this process, shifting her physical relationship to the canvas and limiting her materials, adding intimacy to each stroke. Her chromatic world—ochres, rose pinks, and deep blues that merge the softness of northern light with the saturated clarity of Los Angeles—extends this sense of fluidity. In several canvases, rivers and waterfalls appear not as backdrop but as structuring forces, echoing the steady, life-giving currents beneath every composition.
Set within the layered architecture of Hospitalet—once a site of healing and control, now restored as a space of renewal—‘Två Hjärtan’ becomes a meditation on cycles. The seed already contains the plant; the bloom holds the memory of its root. In Engström’s vision, the river of life runs through it all, carrying both artist and viewer forward, each transformed by the other in ways that are continuous, flowing, and irreversible.”
– Anitra Lourie, Paris, 2025
Camilla Engström, TVÅ HJÄRTAN, Press Release
Camilla Engström was born in Örebro, Sweden in 1989, and currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
Recent solo exhibitions include NOMAD Circle, Carl Kostyál, St. Moritz (2025); ART021, Carl Kostyál, Shanghai (2024); ‘Ro’, Carl Kostyál, London (2024); NADA, Carl Kostyál, New York (2024); Marfa Invitational, Carl Kostyál, Texas (2024); MARKET ART Fair, Carl Kostyál, Stockholm (2023); ‘Valley of the Moon’, Over the Influence, Paris (2023); ‘Undercurrents’, Over the Influence, Bangkok (2022), ‘Mantle’, König Galerie Berlin (2022); ‘Emerging Passages’, Over The Influence Gallery, Hong Kong (2021); O‘Målningar till Mamma och Pappa’, Carl Kostyál, Stockholm (2021).
Recent group exhibitions include ‘Gullringsbo Konstsamling Vol 3’ curated by Carl Kostyál, Hospitalet, Stockholm (2025); ‘The Cloak of Dreams’ curated by Carl Kostyál, SWCAC, Shenzhen (2025); MARKET ART Fair, Carl Kostyál, ‘For Pete’s Sake 2.0’, Stockholm; KIAF SEOUL, Carl Kostyál, Seoul (2024); ‘Dog Days of Summer’, Timothy Taylor, New York (2024); ‘Beyond The Visible’, Albertz Benda, Los Angeles (2024); ‘Painters of Modern Life I’, Carl Kostyál, Ibiza (2023); ‘Stockholm Sessions’, Carl Kostyál, Stockholm (2021); ‘Gullringsbo Konstamling’, Carl Kostyál, Stockholm (2022); ’Rise and Shine’, Over The Influence, Hong Kong (2020); ‘Legalise Humanity’, Subliminal Projects, Los Angeles (2020); ‘Spring Break Art Show LA’, Hilde Gallery, Los Angeles (2019); ‘Sweet Cheeks’, Big Pictures Gallery, Los Angeles (2018); ‘Visible Range’, Deli Gallery, New York (2017) among others.