About me

My name is Rut Amsell and I am a Stockholm-based artist. I studied the fundamentals of fine art at Gerlesborgsskolan and today I paint daily while continuing to develop and explore my artistic practice.

Themes such as youth, grief, graffiti, and memory often reappear in my work. I primarily work with oil paint, oil pastel and acrylic, but I like to combine different materials in order to find a certain feeling both in the process and in the finished piece. I paint everyday-oriented motifs based on objects and images from my own life, such as dinners, nature, and daily life, alongside my personal projects that revolve around loss and identity.

In recent years, projects such as Minnesbanken and Sorgbanken have taken shape. In Minnesbanken, I explore my experiences as a teenager in a time of crisis, as well as graffiti culture, community, escape, and destructiveness. In Sorgbanken, I work with the hundreds of drawings left behind by my late father. By lifting figures from his ink drawings and placing them within my own environments, I try to portray grief, presence, and the relationship that continues after death.

I seek a form of painting where the permitted and the forbidden can coexist, where emotion and imperfection are allowed to exist alongside the realistic and controlled, both in the process and in the motifs themselves.

On this site, you can view a selection of my works and ongoing projects, as well as purchase original paintings and prints.