From Björn Springfeldt’s text, June 20, 2010:

“Every autumn, the Norwegian painter Olav Christopher Jenssen—since 1982 based in Berlin and with a room of his own at Kunstmuseum Bonn devoted exclusively to German art—hosted a gentlemen’s dinner in his studio to eat lutefisk and take a swing at good health. Among the guests, Olav pointed out a young man with a hood on his head and sagging baggy pants and said, ‘Björn, his name is Andreas, he’s Swedish and a hell of a good painter.’

The following day, I visited Andreas Eriksson in his temporary studio. There I encountered a non-dogmatic painting practice, entirely without stylistic limitations and with a fantastic energy and precision.

During the more than ten years that have passed since then, I have followed what he does and count him among the most interesting artists of his generation, also in an international perspective. Although painting stands at the center of his work, he also works with photography, sculpture, and printmaking, without any hierarchical order.

At the age of eighteen, he applied to the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm and was accepted. It was the professor John-e Franzén who insisted, when his colleagues thought he could wait, so young as he was.

A number of years ago, I curated an exhibition of Andreas Eriksson at Kristianstad Art Museum. For the opening, John-e Franzén came and, during a tour together with Andreas, made a thought-provoking remark: ‘Andreas, you are just as good as when we admitted you.’

Art is born out of art, the spirit of the times, and life circumstances, and at the Royal Institute of Art there then prevailed a postmodern “discourse” distilled into slogans proclaiming the death of the subject and of the masterpiece. Even to devote oneself to painting was suspect, and to produce one large painting after another in a creative flow must have been embarrassing. In response to this challenge, Andreas Eriksson devised various methods of making images without placing the artist’s personality in the foreground.
[…]

Together with impulses ranging from Evert Lundquist’s light-soaked and heavy paint matter with its sparse signs, to Günther Förg’s reduced, urban, assertive, and self-reflective painting, a sometimes existential vulnerability and a questioning attitude have given Andreas Eriksson’s artistic practice its powerful energies.”