ArtistSwedish
Fredrik Wretman
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Fredrik Wretman was born in Stockholm in 1953 and has spent his career moving between the familiar and the displaced - between Stockholm and Chiang Mai, between antiquity and pop culture, between the deeply serious and the quietly absurd. His path into art began at Gerleborgsskolan (1972-1975), continued through ABF's art school, and culminated at the Royal Institute of Arts in Stockholm, where he graduated in 1985. He has since served as an acting professor both there and at Konstfack, shaping generations of Swedish artists.
His early work drew attention through large-scale water installations where polished floor surfaces dissolved into mirrored sheets, collapsing spatial logic and disorienting the viewer in unexpectedly delicate ways. The 1991 exhibition 'American Floors (Russian Slippers)' at Moderna Museet in Stockholm established his reputation as a singular voice in Swedish postmodernism - an artist willing to turn institutional architecture into a field of perceptual uncertainty.
The Goatrans series, which occupied Färgfabriken in Stockholm with the 1997 installation 'Goatrans (Pacific)', expanded his vocabulary significantly. Thirty-two orange foam rubber castings of Wretman himself, posed as a Buddha figure and surrounded by water projections from the Pacific, the Amazon, and the Trondheim Fjord, the work became one of the more discussed Swedish installations of its decade. A follow-up, 'Looking For Alice Fine', returned to Färgfabriken in 2006 with renewed focus on the Goatrans figure as a sculptural and spiritual presence.
Through extended stays in Thailand, Wretman developed an abiding interest in Buddhist imagery, meditating monks, and the visual language of devotion. This eventually led him toward traditional bronze casting using the lost wax method, a centuries-old technique he began applying from the 2010s onward to create a prolific series of mythological and fantastical figures. The 2015 exhibition 'Lost and Found' at Galleri Flach presented these pieces as something akin to an archaeological dig - a field of bronze beings that seemed to have surfaced from several civilisations at once, touching on Greco-Roman classicism, Hindu iconography, and something altogether personal.
Galleri Flach has been his primary gallery home for many years, and the relationship has produced several key Stockholm exhibitions, including 'We Don't Need Another Hero, Really (?)' in 2022 and 'Asterism' in 2024. His work is held in the collections of Moderna Museet Stockholm, the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Oslo, Göteborgs Konstmuseum, Malmö Museum, and Statens Konstråd.
On the auction market, Wretman's work circulates primarily through Bukowskis and Stockholms Auktionsverk, where his sculptures and prints appear regularly. His 'Goatrans' polyurethane editions have sold in the range of 6,500 to 15,000 SEK. A Källemo-published edition print 'Ljus färg (svart kabel)' from 2005 has also appeared at auction, reflecting collector interest in his multiples alongside his one-of-a-kind bronzes.