Preservation of Fishy Traditions (surströmmingsskiva)
Oil on linen, 24-2025, 200 x 260 cm
On display in my solo show ”Sweetish” @cfhillofficial
March 5 - April 4
Luncheon in Silence (En Svensk Tiger)
Oil on linen, 100 x 80 cm
2025
Excerpt from @matthewjholman essay Luncheon in Silence (En Svensk tiger) (2025), another work from the series, the artist inserts himself into a tranquil lakeside scene alongside a female companion. Her bikini mirrors the cold blue of the water, while once more a pervasive yellow tint saturates the composition. Together, this scheme recalls the bicolour Swedish flag, IKEA’s corporate palette, and En Svensk Tiger the World War II propaganda campaign that encouraged silence as a defence against espionage. In the painting, this emblem reappears as the rug beneath the seated figures. Gently evocative of Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863), in which the artist forced the bourgeois image to confront the social relations it preferred to naturalize, Beyene similarly works from inside an assumed pictorial language rather than rejecting it outright. If Manet’s contemporaries – who refused his Déjeuner entry to the Salon and instead consigned it to the Salon des Refusés were scandalised by the confrontational realism of the woman’s gaze, read as brazen and indecent for its suggestion of contemporary sexuality rather than classical allegory, then Beyene’s image proposes a quieter disturbance, one that signals meaning without declaring it, maintaining the logic and double-meaning of tiga: to remain silent.
Sweetish @cfhillofficial@michaelelmenbeck
Friendly Face (I, II & V)
Oil on linen, 2024
50x60 cm
Excerpt from @matthewjholman essay
A quieter but equally incisive exploration unfolds in the Friendly Face series, six intimate portraits in a restricted palette of yellow, green, and blue, punctuated by occasional flashes of red, in which Beyene renders his subjects almost overexposed within the natural setting, as though the pastoral landscape itself has overwhelmed their singularity with an excess of colour. The figures nearly dissolve into their surroundings. The paintings are therefore less concerned with who these individuals are than with how faces and bodies are read, how “fitting in” is recognised, and how quickly someone can be perceived as out of place. Beyene be notes that he is frequently asked about his background in Sweden – a question that appears innocent yet marks difference at first glance. In these portraits, it becomes clear that the issue is no longer one of identity but ordinariness: not who the sitter is, but who is permitted to seem unremarkable, and to fade into their surroundings.
@cfhillofficial@michaelelmenbeck
Descending Order
Oil on linen, 2025
100 x 90 cm
Words @matthewjholman
This tension also comes into focus in Descending Order (2025), which places the artist’s late grandmother and mother alongside a self-portrait, each figure shown in profile against an impossibly blue sky. The painting evokes a dynastic group portrait – a format that usually promises clear lineage – only to unsettle the audience’s assumptions about race. Its title, borrowed from the absurdities of online shopping filters, points to an uneasy ranking of inheritance. Beyene describes the work as emerging from the ambiguity of being, as he puts it, “not really Black, not really white, and existing in this in-between space that can be hard to grasp or place,” and from a sense that, in Sweden’s current political climate, the value he is perceived to contribute is thus diminished.
@cfhillofficial@michaelelmenbeck
Preservation of Fishy Traditions II (kräftskiva)
Oil on linen, 24-2025, 200 x 270 cm
Excerpt from @matthewjholman brilliant exhibition text
The title of Preservation of Fishy Traditions (kräftskiva) (2024–2025) plays on both the literal depiction of redder-than-red crayfish – to be deliciously paired with dill and aquavit – and on a colloquial expression implying doubt or suspicion. In the painting, children arrange paper lanterns with smiling moons and blow-up inflatable crayfish-shaped balloons around a long outdoor table while a handsome young father steadies a fishing boat to return his daughter to shore. In doing so, Beyene reimagines Carl Larsson’s depictions of the kräftskiva, or crayfish party, a ritual that emerged alongside Sweden’s expanding middle class
in the nineteenth century. In 1907 the state introduced a closed season on cray-fish fishing before early August to prevent overharvesting and protect dwindling native stocks, consolidating the celebration around a fixed date. What had
been earlier associated with the aristocracy become the purview of the urban bourgeoisie before becoming spread across classes and media, transforming scarcity and regulation into a national symbol of abundance and sociability. As Beyene has observed, such traditions often hinge on contingent origins: a “pretty straightforward pictorial decision,” he notes of Larsson’s red crayfish
motif, can “snowball into something that feels like cultural common sense,” slipping so fully into the national imagination that it seems always to have existed.
On display at @cfhillofficial
March 5 - April 4
@michaelelmenbeck
