Maitri (noun) A Sanskrit term meaning loving-kindness, friendliness, or benevolent goodwill. In Buddhist and Hindu traditions, maitri denotes an active attitude of warmth, empathy, and non-harm toward oneself and others. It extends beyond personal affection to encompass a universal sense of connection, emphasizing unconditional friendliness cultivated through awareness and practice, and serving as a foundation for compassion, ethical conduct, and inner balance.

Larsen / Warner is pleased to present Maitri, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Swedish artist Gustav Hjelmgren (b.1979, Sweden) his first with the gallery. Alongside the exhibition, in room three of the gallery we will also be presenting a selection of works from Hjelmgren’s Presence series. Hjelmgren grew up in a family of painters – his great-great grandfather was the renowned Swedish painter Richard Bergh and his grandmother painted her entire life. A self-taught artist with a background as a trained nurse, Hjelmgren brings to his work a deep consideration of human experience, qualities that shape his meditative and introspective approach to painting.

With this new body of work, Hjelmgren’s focus was on exploration and curiosity; working with a state of presence and loving kindness - a quiet counterforce to the unrest and hardships we currently see in the world. In Maitri, Hjelmgren’s series of vibrant oil on canvas works seem almost animated in movement. But the energy impelling this motion is never agitated or frantic, instead, Hjelmgren’s skill is to make each painting feel steady, relaxed and spontaneously responsive. Soft, undulating, slippery forms nestle together to form shapes within each painting, their grip on each other never completely firm. Hjelmgren imbues these forms with the kinetic potential to shift and move, creating a rhythmic, dynamic balance between line, colour and form. The sweeping shapes create the platform for the sumptuous swathes of oil paint; layered, overlapping bodies of colour that are a combination of both structure and improvisation. The Maitri paintings are painted on the floor with Hjelmgren often working on multiple canvases at the same time. Oil paint is mixed with thinning agents and applied to the canvas using sponges and large brushes creating a process that is physical, direct, and responsive; reflecting the relationship between accident and intent.

 Hjelmgren’s Presence series depict hypnotic compositions formed by soft concentric rings of colour that emanate from a central point, evoking expanding ripples in water or the auratic glow of stars.  Working with oil stick, brushes, sponges, and his hand, Hjelmgren builds softly layered surfaces defined by both a saturated solidity and a phantom quality, creating striking forms that linger on the edge of disappearance, emerging from the canvas ground like the echo of an image. Hjelmgren imagines the paintings not as fixed symbols but as living portals, inviting pause and a silent dialogue with light, space, and the unseen. The circles do not appear static but rather pulse with movement and radiate outwards, as if to pull the viewer in. Hjelmgren indeed describes his paintings as entry points into a space where the boundaries of thought soften and linear time is disrupted, evoking instead expansion without resolution – like a reverberating exhale or an endless ripple. Hjelmgren’s Presence series sits in the lineage of artists such as Jasper Johns, Kenneth Noland and Ugo Rondinone, who have also utilised the circle and concentric circles as a potent motif, variously serving as symbol, structure, and meditative form that distills perception, rhythm, and repetition into a universal visual language.

Hjelmgren’s work was included in the group exhibition Hey Hey, My My at Eric Firestone Gallery, NY in 2025, and he recently completed an extraordinary wall mural commission for Scandic Malmen in Stockholm. He has exhibited at Galleri Torekov (2023) and Galleri Deurr (2016-2021)