A fashion collaboration featuring accessories and hand-embellished ready-to-wear, alongside new paintings presented at this year’s Market Art Fair and Ross-Sutton Gallery.
Rugiyatou Ylva Jallow paints women and only women. Inhabiting public spaces, active bodies carry surf boards, ride bikes, and lace-up roller skates. Sometimes in pairs or groups they lay on sandy beaches or float in lush green meadows. Often with eyes cast beyond the gaze of the viewer, each woman is immersed in a world all her own. “I’ve always been drawn to painting women because I feel like we’re these amazing creatures that create life and we’re so powerful in so many ways,” she shared. The Swedish Gambian artist who traded Sweden’s polar nights – a season of 24/7 darkness – for the sun-filled City of Angels, presented a solo booth with albertz benda at the 20th anniversary of Market Art Fair, during the 11th edition of Stockholm Art Week. This year, the largest and longest-standing contemporary art fair in the Nordic region expanded beyond it to include galleries in the UK and the US. A fortuitous move to Los Angeles saw Jallow meet the team at albertz benda and in 2023 they mounted her first solo. A flurry of group and solo shows from Los Angeles to New York to London brought her work to newer audiences but none reached Swedish soil with the gallery–until now.
Last month Jallow showcased her most ambitious projects-to-date. A fashion collaboration with The Mack Art Foundation and Swedish brand, A Day’s March. And ethereal paintings of resting and reclining women, inspired by Renaissance masters, depicted in Sweden’s wooded landscapes at multiple sites across the Scandinavian city, including albertz benda and Ross-Sutton Gallery. The Mack Art Foundation, founded by art collector and philanthropist, Christine Mack, provides emerging artists residing outside of New York up to 3 months of studio space turning residential and commercial buildings into artist studios. For their second collaboration, the foundation and fashion brand teamed up with Jallow, a former artist-in-residence, to create bespoke accessories and hand-embellished garments. Limited to 30 pieces each and only available in store during Stockholm Art Week, Jallow created a silk scarf featuring one of her paintings, and hand-painted 15 unique pieces on A Day’s March signature over-shirt finishing them with embroidery.
What Grows Between Us, 2026. Courtesy Albertz Benda.
We often travel to return, rediscovering parts of ourselves along the way. At times, the spaces we inhabit, rather than illuminating what’s present, can sometimes highlight what’s missing in our surroundings. For Jallow, European classical paintings, however inspiring for their canonical rigor, always left a void she felt compelled to fill. The history of figurative painting rarely sees Black or biracial women depicted. When included, Black figures in Western art are often subjects of subjugation illustrating scenes of racialized violence, where narratives of trauma and misery loom large. “There’s a lot more Black art in the world right now, which I’m happy about but in the past, it was always focused on the slave trade and the things we’ve been through. I want my pieces to be about the positive aspect of us just enjoying life,” she expanded. What then, does it mean to expand the canon of historical painting, drawing on the techniques of Caravaggio and Botticelli to depict Black and biracial women today? What visual cues and clues do artists leave for viewers to find? And in finding them, what conversations do they spark?
Jallow infuses cultural legacies passed down by her father to celebrate and take pride in her heritage. “I was raised in a very African household. My dad always spoke very highly of our culture, of our practices. From a very young age, we learned the language, we learned about the music,” she explained. In her paintings, she pays homage to her ancestors, floating hands symbolize protection and a connection to the spirit realm, while threads finish paintings with layers of depth and texture, illustrating the connections between races. Her affinity for nature is expressed in the pastoral landscapes of Sweden’s countryside, inspired by her mother’s home on the well-regarded natural wonder of Gotland. The small island off the coast of Sweden, whose medieval town, Visby, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Honoring and expanding the canon of classical painting, Jallow’s new works at Market and the 6th anniversary of BLACK VOICES/BLACK MICROCOSM, curated by Destinee Ross-Sutton, at Ross-Sutton Gallery, celebrated biracial women and made manifest the immediate concerns she investigates in her practice. Loosely autobiographical, her painting practice incorporates hues of brown, beige, and cream-like skin tones rendering figures visually biracial with features that often mirror her own. “The skin colors came about because I wanted it to be obvious for the viewer to understand my work. I was very intentional to use different skin colors that essentially represent me,” Jallow shared. Images sourced from Pinterest and Instagram are digitally altered before she sketches compositions on acrylic laden canvases. “A lot of biracial women follow me [on social media] and most of them probably have no idea that their faces have been used, because I’ve altered them. I might use one photo, but I’ll change the hair or do full lips or alter the nose,” the artist reveals.
While a return to Sweden showcasing her most rigorous work yet marking a new chapter in Jallow’s practice, up next the artist returns to New York presenting her first solo with albertz benda since 2023.
