Ankarudden

Matthias van Arkel (b. 1967, Stockholm) lives and works in Stockholm. He studied at the Royal Institute of Fine Arts (Kungliga Konsthögskolan) and received his MFA (Master of Fine Arts) from the University of Arts, Crafts and Design (Konstfack), Stockholm.

Van Arkel’s work begins with painting, but gently asks a wider question to explore what a painting can be today. Engaging in conceptual dialogues between painting, sculpture, and spatial installation, van Arkel works primarily with silicone, alongside bronze. Silicone is often considered industrial, but plays a significant role in his art practice with its flexible and responsive nature. Shaped by hand, it reacts directly and sensitively. It bends, stretches, and settles, acquiring an organic and almost bodily presence. This allows the works to be free from fixed positions; they don’t stay still, but lean toward the viewer. In this way, van Arkel’s works occupy a space between flat and three-dimensional.

For van Arkel, material is never just material. Through color, mass, repetition, and space, van Arkel explores how we sense the world and how we move within it. His works do not explain themselves. They invite us to slow down, to look from different distances, and even to touch them, in order to notice how perception changes as we move. Meaning appears gradually, through attention rather than instruction.

The titles of his works may sound simple, yet the works themselves often convey something tender, poetic, and powerful at the same time. Beneath their structured surfaces lies a sensitivity that is connected to him personally. Van Arkel’s works do not seek to be fully understood at once; they linger, fostering a heightened awareness of one’s own presence in the space between object and viewer.

Van Arkel has exhibited widely in Scandinavia, such as in Sweden and Denmark, as well as across Europe in Germany, France, Spain, the United Kingdom, and in the United States. He has also realized numerous permanent public art projects developed in close dialogue with architecture. His work is included in public and private collections throughout Europe and North America, including Moderna Museet, Stockholm.