Lisa Englund Beckers Art Award 2025
Scholar exhibition
Main hall, Färgfabriken
Curator: Emilia Rosenqvist
The recipient of the 2025 Beckers Art Award – a grant of SEK 200,000 and an exhibition at Färgfabriken in Stockholm and KKAM in Höganäs – is Lisa Englund. Born in 1993, she lives and works in Stockholm. Lisa Englund graduated in 2023 with a Master’s Degree in textile art from the Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design.
Lisa Englund takes the expression “from seed to feed” literally. First, she goes on hikes in the woods to find suitable and unsuitable plants, mosses and fungi, which she picks and uses to dye fragrant wools. Then comes the persevering and time-consuming work at the loom. Thump, thump – a craft that defies all haste. A craft that is a paradox in our digital world. Of an obsolete nature. Sustainable and solitary, and with an entirely unique imagery, albeit with a wry glance at the tapestries of Lena Cronqvist (b. 1938) from the 1960s and the textile art of Norwegian-Swedish Hannah Ryggen (1894-1970) – two soulmates in the difficult art of fashioning one’s own nature out of childhood, memories and dreams.
What Lisa Englund’s tapestries offer is another world, an enchanted world of elves and remarkable creatures. A bush burns perilously, watched by wily clouds. A tree with shoes goes for a walk and bends in the gale. A creepy figure emerges from the boggy waters, while another, grimacing, embraces a tree. And there a tousled toy troll suddenly comes by, as though imposed on the surface. Welcome to a dreamy, stylised and comical world, with an underlying pulse of longing and gloom and maybe a few jabs of complex eroticism. Thus, all is playful and compliant, and full of improvisation in a craft of a nature that actually makes it impossible to improvise.
In tapestry after tapestry, Lisa Englund presents picture riddles on what it is to be a searcher in the year of 2024. Her artistic practice has no definite plan, no laboured superstructure, just a personal pictorial storytelling that must out, that must be conveyed, to the benefit of the viewer’s own imagination and empathic capacity.
Lisa Englund receives the 2025 Beckers Art Award for her exquisite textile sense of colour and the singularity and tenacity of her visual narratives. In short: Lisa Englund is honoured for her unique art of painting with wool.
Mårten Castenfors/On behalf of the jury
About the artist
Lisa Englund (b.1993) also called LIEN is a Swedish artist from Västerås based in Stockholm. LIEN works with weaving, collecting and hand-dyeing. I her artistic process she collects mushrooms and plants and dyes by hand the yarns in wool and linen that form the basis of the tapestries. The dyeing process is a method for her to transfer the magic of the forest and plants to the material. The figurative motifs in the art are in direct relation to the seasonally available plants and colors that emerge in the process. In the motifs, she discusses issues around the dichotomies; culture/nature, sacred/profane and human/animal. LIEN has a master’s degree from Konstfack CRAFT with a focus on textiles and has previously studied at The Gerlesborg School of Fine Art. She has participated in group exhibitions at Kulturhuset, ArkDes and Västerås Konsthall. The Beckers Art Award exhibition at Färgfabriken and KKAM Höganäs in 2025 will be her first major solo exhibition.
Related
Beckers Art Award was founded in 1987 by Ulf and Viviann Lindén and has since then proven to have a remarkable ability to identify a young talent on the brink of a breakthrough in their careers, such as Jockum Nordström, Dan Wolgers, Nathalie Djurberg and Julia Bondesson. The scholarship aims to support pioneering creative voices in Sweden, and includes a solo exhibition at Färgfabriken and KKAM – Höganäs as well as a prize sum of SEK 200,000.
The jury: Jenny Lindén Urnes, Mårten Castenfors and Magnus Jensner
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