After the mistake you seldom realize that you've made it. Our collective epiphany is slowly creeping up on us, are we living out the after?

Despite the negative connotations, the mistake is often referred to as an opportunity to improve, but what if it's repeated again and again?

The process often begins without reference, but as the painting gets painted my own recognition comes into play. When shapes emerge on the canvas i try and imagine what they can become, until the seesaw of the familiar and the uncanny finds balance in the middle.

In painting the mistake can be a tool that lets the bodies of paint partly decide for themselves what shapes they take. The painter is through the mistake, a mediator. The painters mission is to, after the mistake, try and make it again and again.

Vera Ljunggren’s distinctive visual world emerges from a playful, almost naive curiosity about the dim recesses of existence. Owl, Palm, Crab — titles that follow the logic of a picture book while simultaneously opening toward something more suggestive. The broken, bare tree branches in the paintings’ landscapes bend into curlicues, as if nature itself were expressing a state of mind rather than serving as a motif. In Fever, the fire-yellow tree seems to pad its way forward on a trunk resembling a small foot, moving through an equally glowing landscape.

Perhaps this can be read as a kind of poetics — for the world of these paintings evokes the fever dream. Despite the sly warmth that accompanies their almost childlike simplicity, the works are filled by a certain unease: the animal in the painting of the same name appears dying or felled, with eerily human, pale skin; Pelargård, despite its inviting title, is brutal in its fateful yet beautiful presence; and the embrace in Embrace is stiff and withdrawn — a turned-away cheek, a ghost-like translucent hand, the silhouette of a body.

Vera Ljunggren was born in 2000 and is based in Stockholm. She studied at Konstfack and Pernby School of Painting, and completed an exchange at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. With Nightgale, she is exhibiting in Sweden for the first time.