In Fägerskiöld’s work, fields of colour serve as ground for line drawings of shelving compartments. Using the basic building blocks of painting, Fägerskiöld explores the act of image-making. His practice itself poses the question – why paint? For Fägerskiöld it is part of the process of generating meaning – making language. The thing and the picture of the thing.

As always in conversation with art history, Fägerskiöld relates to a matrix of painterly touch points. Here the motif exist partly in dialog with the 18th century Korean painting tradition of Chaekgeori (books and things) which depicted shelves containing objects of esteemed cultural value, scholarship and learning.

In that same tradition Fägerskiöld compresses the three-dimensional composition to flatten the pictorial plane. The combination of line in perspective over monochrome hues evokes the Italian Renaissance rivalry between Disegno (drawing, structure, perspective, localised in Florence with artists like Michelangelo and Raphael) and Colore (colour, characterised by Venetian painters Titian, Giorgione and Tintoretto).