ABOUT Sonja

It has always been about colour

Sonja Dahlgren (b 1973) is a contemporary abstract painter based in Gothenburg (Göteborg), Sweden.

THE “WHY”

Sonja’s work is driven by her love of colour, and her fascination with the potential of colour and form to affect emotions and mood. For as long as she can remember, her yearning to paint has been about colour. With her work she investigates how colour, shape, mass and composition can create energy, tension, rhythm and atmosphere, and is interested in how these elements can influence emotions and mood in ways that are often intuitive rather than conscious. For the viewer, she wants to spark their curiosity, but also create space for them to make their own interpretation of what they see and feel.

THE creative process

Sonja’s paintings are rarely preconceived, apart from a loose idea of e.g. a colour combination she wants to explore. Instead the work emerges through her engagement with the materials themselves, and this exploration of the painting is the part that she enjoys the most. She works playfully and experimentally with equal parts intuition and deliberation, while seeking to create a composition that feels interesting, balanced and harmonious. More recently she has started using collage and collage pieces as a way to generate ideas and experiment with colour and form.

Her preferred medium is acrylic paint, but she occasionally uses gouache, oil pastels, oil and oil sticks. Sonja loves working with paper, and paper collage, primarily for its immediacy and impermanent qualities. When she works on canvas, she puts a lot of effort into creating primed surfaces that feels “raw” and imperfect, reminiscent of grainy paper.

Although Sonja’s paintings often read as abstract or semi-abstract, their colours and forms are frequently drawn from her surroundings, such as; fashion, architecture, the marina near her home or flowers in her garden. Sonja’s work is informed by fauvism, abstract expressionism, minimalism and the colour field painting movement, and the work of e.g. Henri Matisse, Ellsworth Kelly, Mary Heilmann and Imi Knoebel.

THE Background

Sonja is a self-taught painter, and before committing fully to painting, her professional journey spanned several creative and human-centred fields. Her education includes a bachelor of early childhood education, a masters degree in psychology as well as a handful of university courses in photography, visual communication, web design and graphic design. She began her career as an early years teacher, later worked as a web designer, photographer and food stylist, and then practiced as a couple’s therapist, when an “almost burn-out” led her to focus seriously on fine art, and develop a studio practice grounded in her love of colour.