Amalia Arfelt was born in 1969 in Stockholm, where she still lives. She is educated at Birkagården Folk High School 1988-90 and at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm 1990-95.
Amalia Arfelt seamlessly connects to the rich tradition of Swedish naïveté and eccentric art that the 20th century has offered.
The driving force behind Amalia Arfelt's artistry is an undisguised joy of storytelling and creation. The animals that always appear in her pictures appear as subjects, personalities, with strong integrity. Sometimes we recognize a species, other times we encounter an odd hybrid. Occasionally our thoughts wander to the world of fables, but we still don't land there. Arfelt's animals retain an aura of impregnable enigma that places them beyond the more predictable structures of fairy tales. The hallucinatory sharpness of the almost self-luminous paintings gives the pictures a twisted, surreal tone.
