I’m sitting in a café in Stockholm’s alternative Södermalm neighborhood, which doesn’t wake up until after 12:30 p.m. That’s when swarms of bikers start migrating, hipster personalities start taking to the street, and multiple startup founders rush to grab a table at the corner café whose large windows let in plenty of April light. It’s fair to say that Stockholm is considered by many to be a great capital, but it’s also a fairly small place. Just a few blocks away, Steensland Berliner, one of Södermalm’s most interesting art spaces, showcases the work of Linnea Sjöberg, a Swedish artist who runs long-term performance projects and immerses herself in distinct social roles to explore identity formation. She translates collected performance experiences into physical works using several different media and processes. Her signature loom weaving draws on personal and family history, incorporating materials such as old fashions and childhood heirlooms to transform vivid memories into textile art.
The exhibition had a pavilion featuring works by Arvida Bjørström at the Markt Art Gallery, a few kilometers from Södermalm on the waterfront. The Paris-based artist, born in the 1990s and raised online, has spent her career interrogating what the Internet does to bodies, and femininity in particular. Her project PET – Expected Emotional Technologies – explores the emotional labor embedded in digital interfaces: the color pink, desire, and the warmth of Siri’s chatbot girlfriends, while commenting on the artificiality and absurdity of online porn.
Stockholm’s ecosystem converges more visibly each spring around Market Art Fair, the city’s premier contemporary fair, which was founded in 2006 by a group of Scandinavian galleries and designed as a tightly curated, gallery-led platform. Over time, it has become the Nordic region’s leading commercial art fair and the anchor of Stockholm Art Week, bringing together art galleries from across Scandinavia alongside a growing international roster while maintaining a deliberately intimate scale. “If you want to make money, buy stocks or gold,” Janet Steensland, director of Steensland Berliner, told the Observer at the fair. “But if you want to make an emotional investment, an investment in culture or knowledge, collect art.”
This seems to be the spirit that drives a very vibrant, if small, art scene, says Oskar Karlsson, owner of ISSUES Gallery. He opened his space in 2015 as a pilot window before launching the official exhibition three years ago in downtown Stockholm – a deliberate choice to set up away from established cultural clusters: Vasastan, Östermalm, and Hornsgatan. “The idea was to be located in a place where people don’t necessarily go to see art, to attract different crowds,” he says. Issues have shifted from experimental, site-specific practice to mostly painting and sculpture, but always with an edge. The current show, featuring works by Danish artist Magnus Andersen, fills the space with bizarre and ludicrous paintings built around a menacing fish following various creatures across a pool.
Its small, horizontally connected scene – where galleries know each other, collectors are patient and institutions are open to coordination – makes Stockholm a useful case study in market success. The global art market is recovering, but unevenly: in 2025, total sales rose 4 percent to about $59.6 billion, driven mainly by high-end auction results, while most galleries saw only slight growth and rising costs. The middle of the market remains under pressure, with many traders facing shrinking margins despite increased activity. In this context, Sweden’s art ecosystem appears of new importance – not as an emerging scene eyeing global attention, but as a functioning ecosystem that has, by most measures, managed to avoid the worst of the turmoil.
Art gallery as a catalyst
The 20th edition marks the show’s first year in a new venue, an industrial cruise ship terminal on the waterfront where a temporary tent structure has been built specifically for the occasion. The century-old former house, Liljevalchs Kunsthalle, is undergoing renovation. This move was probably a risk, since this part of the city is rarely connected to each other.
In 2006, when the exhibition began, there was a specific global circumstance. “At that time, there was a lot of wealth in the world,” says Sarah Berner Bengtsson, the gallery’s director and CEO, whose previous positions include president of the Swedish Gallery Association and director of Gallery Forsblom in Stockholm. “Art became this kind of celebrity, and fashion brands were collaborating with contemporary artists. I think it was a global phenomenon, and then of course it took hold in Sweden as well.”
She notes that Art Basel Miami Beach was also founded that year, along with a wave of private institutions in Stockholm: Bonniers Konsthall, Fotografiska, and Sven-Harris. The city, in microcosm, was part of the same boom. This Nordic connection is felt among the exhibitors at Market Art Fair. Presenting a duo pavilion by Ahmad Sayyar Ghasemi and Aya Sofia Coverle Turan (both artists who immigrated to Denmark as teenagers, and whose work explores memory and displacement), Mikkel Ampe, director of Copenhagen Gallery Tom Christophersen, underscores the regional dynamism: “There is a very active Nordic art scene present at the fair. You see a lot of Danish, Norwegian and Icelandic galleries, but also collectors.” “We already sold a work by a Swedish couple yesterday, and we want to expand our collectors’ collection by these artists.”
This year, for the first time, the fair opens its doors to artists and galleries who are not necessarily from the Nordic scene. “The art scene is global,” says Bengtsson. “There are amazing international galleries that show Nordic artists, and there are Nordic galleries that don’t show any Nordic artists. We have to reflect the global art scene.” There is also a political dimension that you should not be ashamed of. “The world has become more closed, more protective of borders. I believe that art should be a counterpart to that. It is more important than ever that we promote openness and inclusion.” One of the most compelling arguments behind the show’s growing international appeal is geographical. “We are the northernmost art gallery in the world. We are the closest to Sápmi. International curators from everywhere in the world are interested in Sámi art at the moment. It is huge. You cannot see this yet in Basel or Fries.”
A different approach to collecting art
“Collectors here are buying non-local artists, but they would rather do it in London or Paris or New York,” says Destiny Ross Sutton of Ross Sutton Gallery, which a curator founded in 2020 in New York to support emerging black artists, and which has since opened an outpost in Stockholm in 2025. “What we want is for them to buy here.”
Bengtsson understands this dynamic. “At the fair, local collectors are very curious about exhibitions coming from other countries. They feel proud. I don’t know if that’s necessarily how they behave the rest of the year, but at the fair, for sure.” Swedish collecting culture has historically been shaped by a certain amount of conservatism; Decades of social democratic norms have left their mark. “Everyone here is afraid to stand out,” says Ross Sutton. “But this is slowly changing. And we want to be part of that change.”
The shift has been sparked in part by a new generation of art collectors whose fortunes have come from the music industry — Sweden’s huge contribution to global pop music has produced more than a few art patrons — and from technology.
Not all collectors are private, of course. Art patron Eva Levine Ohlin, a lively person and very active former gallery owner, regularly opens her home for dinners and exhibitions. During Stockholm Art Week, it hosts an exhibition next to Nordenhake featuring three Swedish sisters: Sofia, Emma, and Johanna Björström, whose delicate canvases of smoky shapes and geometric abstractions are arranged around the eclectic house.
An artistic ecosystem that takes care of itself
What makes the Swedish art market special is not just one aspect, but the way all its components fit together. Bengtsson makes the case for the Nordics in explicitly comparative terms: New York is losing some of its appeal, and “not everyone wants to go to the United States,” she says.
“London remains complex post-Brexit, and concerns about human rights are weakening the appeal of the Gulf countries. People are keen to discover new markets and new art scenes. The Nordic countries offer something very interesting: strong artists, good institutions, a serious collector base, great wealth. It has good democratic values. It’s a good area to be in.”
The Swedish market is not immune to the pressures described in the Art Basel and UBS report. The so-called 1% rule – which stipulates that 1% of public construction budgets be allocated to art – has provided less funding during the current recession, as fewer buildings are being built. “You shouldn’t deny that there is a stagnation in the Swedish art market as well,” says Bengtsson.
But she was quick to keep context in mind: “If you compare it to the global situation, we haven’t seen any exhibition closures. And they are still participating here.” She argues that the market is stabilized by its breadth, private art collectors, state purchases, and a buyer base that spans across price points. “We have people buying in the middle market, we have people buying in the upper market…we have a large group of people buying in general. It’s an ecosystem that supports itself.”
This relative stability contrasts with experiences elsewhere, where turbulence is more pronounced. The Market Art Fair is a striking example of that resilience that operates without institutional support. “Ninety-nine percent of the exhibition is funded by the fees we charge the galleries, plus a little private sponsorship,” says Bengtsson. This year, for the first time in several years, the municipality of Stockholm provided some support, but state support is still largely absent.
Back in Södermalm, the sun doesn’t seem to want to set on these Nordic days, growing longer and longer, and the café crowd has thinned down to the last few tables of people who are in no hurry to be anywhere else.
Stability seems to be a lot like this: a collective emotional investment made by gallery owners, collectors, and artists who keep showing up, season after season, convinced that the work has significance beyond its value. This is how Sweden was able to build one of the most stable art markets in Europe, more than any passing political or artistic boom.
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