Anna Pajak: [WG.128] Medan solen fortfarande brinner / While the sun is still burning

Anna Pajak is a Swedish painter and printmaker whose visual world moves on the boundary between the abstract and the figurative. While her earlier works were characterized by architectural and geometric elements that both depicted and created spatial units, organic forms have recently begun to take up more space in her paintings. With a suggestive visual language, the paintings invite associative reflections on time and space, not as linear and absolute entities, but as fluid states.

Pajak moves freely between art historical, literary, and religious references. She engages in a dialogue with creative individuals-from Baroque masters to contemporary writers-who, like herself, are interested in spirituality and transcendence, in that which lies beyond the empirically measurable.

Her paintings teem with symbols that open up for ambivalent interpretations. They are often symmetrically constructed, and the individual visual elements guide the viewer's gaze clearly through the narrative of the image. These may be lines, geometric shapes, or abstracted body parts that form large-scale patterns. Fluttering ribbons and undulating petals create a pulsating rhythm, placed in landscapes of light and color. In the abstracted pictorial space, Pajak thus creates a new context, freeing itself from traditional symbolism and open to contemporary interpretations.

Anna Pajak (born 1992) lives and works in Småland. She graduated from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, where she received her master's degree in 2020. Deeply rooted in painting, Pajak's oeuvre also includes printmaking. In 2021, she received QSPA's Inspirational Award, and last year she inaugurated a large-scale public artwork in Hagastaden, Stockholm. Her works have been shown in galleries and in institutional contexts in Sweden, Norway and Germany.