Viola Sparre
Viola Sparre is a contemporary Swedish painter whose work explores deeply personal themes surrounding complex family dynamics, heritage, memories, and the psychological landscape of childhood. Sparre is based in Stockholm, where she creates vividly colourful paintings in the ‘well-organised chaos’ of her somewhat ‘messy’ studio with paint-strewn walls and floor.
After supporting herself financially through a variety of different odd jobs and having trained and worked as a silver- and goldsmith, Sparre eventually turned her interest to traditional easel painting, or, as Sparre herself put it in an interview with Maja Milanovic (‘Entwined in Time: Viola Sparre’s Portrait of Family’, Tarantula: Authors and Art, 6 November 2024), ‘When I discovered painting as a medium for creative expression, I was hooked and haven’t worked with metal since.’.
Sparre has (in Milanovic’s interview) attributed her background in metalworking as the main source for her desire to work in colours, where her current painterly style is inspired by cinema:
especially Wes Anderson’s ability to bring life to the sets in his films through his vivid colour palette. I like the idea of using bright colours as a kind of drop curtain for the darker themes that sometimes emerge in my works. I want the viewer to see beyond what they first encounter in the colour palette. For me, colours are a good way to achieve balance in the narrative.
As a mother of three children (herself born into a large family with eight siblings) and as an artist whose work, amongst other things, explores themes of childhood and motherhood, Sparre considers her children to be a vital source of direct inspiration (Maja Milanovic, ‘Entwined in Time: Viola Sparre’s Portrait of Family’, Tarantula: Authors and Art, 6 November 2024):
My muses are definitely my children, but I also create many paintings in which my mother plays a prominent role. I usually portray them as small children; thus, the portraits are often based on memories or stories from my family’s history. Even though I frequently blend the timelines together and have family members meet at the same age, I think that the family history plays a significant role.
Sparre studied painting at Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design, earning her BFA in the spring of 2024 (upon which she enrolled in the university’s MFA programme the following autumn). Sparre’s BFA exhibition Ett Dockhem (A Doll’s House), named after the groundbreaking naturalistic 1879 play of the same name, written by Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906, Norwegian playwright considered one of the world’s pre-eminent writers of the 19th century and often referred to as ‘the father of modern drama’ as well as being the most frequently performed dramatist in the world after William Shakespeare), a strong source of inspiration for Sparre, was accompanied by the following description of Sparre and her art:
In her artistic practice, Viola explores motherhood, childhood, home and the relationships between them. Through figurative painting, she depicts the people closest to her. In her art, she strives to portray the complex dynamics of family relationships and the many nuances of emotions that they contain. By intertwining different timelines, she enables encounters between different generations in everyday situations, while an undertone of melancholy permeates the images. Children play a major role in her practice; she wants to explore the child's relationship to the adult world and thereby convey the fragility of innocence. [...] Questions about heritage and what shapes our identity are at the centre of her artistic exploration.
Following Sparre’s BFA graduation, with its successful presentation of her work, she was selected as that summer’s solo exhibitor at Körsbärsgårdens konsthall in Burgsvik, Gotland, Sweden, where she showed Ett Dockhem from 20 July to 15 September. This was followed up by another solo exhibition, Betraktare, at CFHILL, Stockholm (22 November 2024-9 January 2025).
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