There is something rather final about cutting into a painting. For Swedish artist Andreas Eriksson, however, it became the beginning of something else.

Eriksson started making his Cutouts in 2014 while working on large-scale paintings. When a painting was not going where he wanted, he would look for the parts that still held his attention, cut those sections from the canvas and let the remainder go. What survived were small fragments of paintings that otherwise no longer exist. In 2019, he began to consider these fragments as a body of work in their own right.

Hindergässli in Saanen is showing works from the Cutout 2022 series this summer. Each is modest in size – the works in the exhibition measure 50 by 40 centimetres – but within those boundaries Eriksson’s original paintings have been reduced to their most interesting passages. Looking through the works, areas of green, ochre, pink, grey and blue meet at irregular edges, sometimes suggesting a landscape and sometimes becoming entirely abstract.

That ambiguity runs through much of Eriksson’s work. Born in Björsäter in 1975, he studied at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm before settling in Medelplana in rural Sweden. The landscape around him – its vegetation, weather, light and changing seasons – became central to his work, although what appears on the canvas is rarely a straightforward depiction of what he sees.

Eriksson works across painting, sculpture, photography, printmaking and textiles, and represented Sweden at the Venice Biennale in 2011. His works are held in major collections including Moderna Museet in Stockholm and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Yet the idea behind the Cutouts is refreshingly simple. A large painting does not work. One small part of it does. Eriksson keeps that part.

Andreas Eriksson – Cutout 2022 | Where: Hindergässli, Saanen | When: Until 30 August 2026 | by appointment