Born in Gothenburg, Sweden in 1973, Hrik’s home was soaked in art and literature. His father ran an Art School and was a respected Art Director, while his mother taught English, Swedish and Literature, so drawing materials and books were always within arm’s reach.

Being an avid painter from an early age, some of Hrik’s influences during his formative years in the 80’s were breakdance & graffiti, Dungeons & Dragons, synth-pop, Star Wars, MTV, Game & Watch and Rubik’s Cube, the birth of house music, rave culture and the emergence of sampling culture. And painting, drawing and doodling was something he did daily. Around 89-90 Hrik's dad bought a Macintosh, where Hrik not only started playing around creating art digitally, but also making music.

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In high school Hrik studied the Aesthetics program, and he later took Digital Art at the Gothenburg University, parallel to studies at the Psychology and Humanistic departments. Being eager to get his hands dirty outside of school, he dropped out of Uni, and took his first “real” job in ‘96 as a Motion Graphics Designer for a local film production company. 

 

Having learned the trade from the ground up on his own, and soon becoming a sought-after compositor for music videos, Hrik was then headhunted to Dubai in 2004, by a very reputable production house, serving an international clientele. With work stealing time and energy from art, Hrik moved into the business side of the film industry in 2006, starting up his own production company together with a South African partner. As the company’s Executive Producer he turned it into a very successful business, working with creatives globally.

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But as fate has it, Hrik's business venture ate even more of his creative energy. So after 12 years in Dubai - and by now married and a father - it was time to leave, and the decision fell on Sweden. The Hrik family soon settled in in a haunted former TB hospital on a quaint island in the archipelago, where they currently reside.

 

At this point, and after extensive psychosynthesis therapy, as well as being enormously influenced by his wife’s esoteric practises, Hrik picked up art again, initially as a form of self therapy! So in 2020, coincidentally just weeks before the big Covid outbreak, Hrik picked up the paint brush again! With clear and high goals, he set to work on his first proper collection, The Akashic Records!

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If you look it up, The Akashic Records is a “compendium of all human events, thoughts, words, emotions, and intent ever to have occurred in the past, present, or future.” So in essence, it is a record of everything that has ever happened and will ever happen. And if you believe that “Reality” is we know ir, is in fact a simulated world, then The Akashic Records are essentially the “Reality App”, the game called Reality.

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After The Akashic Records, Hrik has also completed his follow up collection called "The End of the ToDo List", where he went even deeper into his psyche, as well as advanced his visual style. If you look at specifically the last 7 paintings of this collection, you'll notice the shift in visual approach. Hrik is not one much for labels or categorisation, but the new/current style could called "pop surrealism".

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As of December 2020, Hrik has also started his 3rd collection, entitled "The Trauma Suite", dealing with some particularly hard experiences he's had in life, and especially during childhood. The first painting in this collection is "Budgie", which is about Hrik's first encounter with Death, when his grandmother accidentally crushed his pet budgie to death. Not an uplfiting theme for this collection, but very healing for Hrik, and also all the traumas are pretty interesting stories, and they were all very, very formative one way or another.

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Throughout these collection - and his earlier art - Hrik often explores themes like simulation theory, philosophy, psychology, spirituality, nature, politics, digital culture, and the destruction and construction of norms and culture through art. In short, Hrik is here to eff shit up. His style is possibly best described as a mix of collages, pop-surrealism, pixel-art, and street art, and tends to feature a lot of eyes, strangely limbed humanoids, spirit animals, and digital deities.

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