In Marielle Göthberg’s paintings, we enter a personal and mental landscape, rooted in her memory of a northern Sweden that feels distant—geographically, temporally, and emotionally. These recollections stand in sharp contrast to her everyday life in Copenhagen, where nature consists of cultivated parks and cemeteries, places that never allow for distance or a full view of the horizon. They are memories of sunlight flickering across grass, of wind whispering through leaves, of waking at night to wander a darkened house where everything feels both familiar and estranged.
Göthberg renders the Swedish landscape with deep sensitivity. Her paintings carry a painterly form of nordic noir, evoking a distinctly Scandinavian melancholy: a quiet, inward longing for a nature as austere and solemn as it is beautiful. It is a nature charged with atmosphere and spirit, suggesting more than what the eye can perceive—something sublime, yet at the same time intimate and protective.
For Göthberg, darkness is tactile and enveloping. As we move through the shadowed interiors of her works, we sense an immediate familiarity. We know the silence of the forests, the sound of spruces in the wind, the damp forest floor where sunlight never reaches. Nature becomes homely, as reassuring as the bed awaiting the one returning from the night.
Marielle Göthberg (b. 1998, Stockholm, Sweden) is currently completing her studies at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, graduating in 2026. She has held solo exhibitions at Minuit Vernissage at Grand Teatret and Saabs Kunstförening, Linköping, and has participated in group exhibitions at Galleri Helle Knudsen, Stockholm; Galleri Asbæk Arden, Copenhagen; and the Artists’ Autumn Exhibition (KE) in 2024. Göthberg lives and works in Copenhagen.
