Josefine Borgström

(b. 1992, Karlskrona, Sweden)

Hot Spaces, Wild Mouths I, II, III, 2024
Series of three paintings: oil and oil pastel on linen

Skisser, 2024
Sketches
Mixed media

Exploring gender and sexuality through themes such as sports and art history, Josefine Borgström primarily works with large-scale oil painting. She investigates the sometimes-delicate borderlands of contrasting concepts, such as intimacy/violence or the beautiful/the grotesque, with a focus equally divided between movements or actions of the human body and the materiality of paint.

Hot Spaces, Wild Mouths is a series of paintings using references from women’s professional wrestling – entertainment wrestling – where the idea of sports and gender as a performance is made highly visible. Dressed in deliberately stereotypical character costumes, the wrestlers perform feuds, friendships, loves and fights for their audience, and the line between empowerment and fetish becomes blurred.

Interview with Josefine Borgström