Fredrik Åkum (Kristinehamn, 1987) lives and works in Gothenburg.

Swedish artist Fredrik Åkum works in a continuous process where virtually every work originates from an earlier one. He is sensitive to materiality and lets his methods involve painting, sculptures, and photography. His interest in the translation in-between mediums is a recurring theme where he focuses on repetition and what’s lost in the translations. This stems from his many years of working with fanzines and artist books, which he uses as a parallel platform to the exhibition room. Through figurative sources, he wants to reach abstractions, where the viewer has an essential part to fill in the gaps. He is most often working out ways for himself in the process to involve coincidence, to reach a development-like state where the final result – or attempt – is not always in his absolute control. To reach this state Åkum tries to renew and develop methodological systems which assure a certain margin of error.

In recent years, Åkum has wanted to approach architectural qualities with his work. In contrast to his paintings, which are often relatively flat and watercolor-like, he started to work more sculpturally with monochrome reliefs. These reliefs most often derive from his paintings, drawings, or traces of his paintings.