Camilla Engström quit fashion to become one of the art world's buzziest painters

Just over a month ago, on the island of Blidö in the north of Stockholm’s archipelago, Camilla Engström made a studio of gallerist Carl Kostyál’s living room. Most mornings, she rises early and, surrounded by family photos of the Kostyál clan, paints her otherworldly landscapes, plucked from her own imagination. The gallerist isn’t there much, leaving Engström alone with her canvases and boombox (if you follow her on Instagram, you’ll know she likes to dance during her downtime). “It’s a pretty big island, but you definitely feel isolated,” she says. “I was kind of scared being there alone.” However, aside from a single incident – police reacting to gunshots, probably from a hunter – life on the island has been relatively uneventful. Next weekend, she’ll show the fruits of her labour, 10 very large paintings, at Carl Kostyál’s booth at Market Art Fair.

It’s a homecoming of sorts for Engström. Born in Örebro to a Swedish father and a Chinese mother (her mum owns the restaurant Chong Qing, which, in this journalist’s humble opinion, is the best Chinese restaurant in Stockholm), the artist moved to New York to pursue a career in fashion in her early twenties. Like many before her, she quickly discovered working entry-level gigs at the likes of Calvin Klein and J. Crew wasn’t entirely pleasant. “I was getting yelled at all the time. I’m like, ‘I’m at the bottom of this – why treat me like shit?’ I’m barely getting paid,” she says. “I was looking at my bosses and thinking, ‘Do I want to do this for ten years to get where they are?’” So she quit, initially with the intention of starting her own clothing line. However, when she uploaded some sketches she had made to Instagram and discovered her followers were eager to buy her art, she quickly changed course. She sold her first piece to a couple in the Bronx for $200.

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But she didn’t come into her current aesthetic until she moved to Los Angeles in 2018. Feeling “a little stuck” Engström sought out one of the city’s countless energy healers – Reiki, specifically. “It put me in some kind of meditative state where it unlocked some things that had probably been simmering in my brain,” she says. “I wasn’t really into meditation, but after that I started meditating.” Previously, she had been painting with acrylics – figuratively, mostly – but the session brought about something entirely new. “I was like, ‘OK, I’m supposed to make landscapes that remind me of the body’,” she says. Sometimes her references to the body are subtle – the roll of a hill evoking the curve of the torso – sometimes it’s a a big, beautiful breast hanging in a pastel sky.

A self-taught artist, Engström, at just 33 years old, has well and truly made it; showing internationally (next stop, the Armory in New York with Carl Kostyál and then another show at Over The Influence in Paris) and with noteworthy interest from collectors. Recently, Artsy (the leading digital marketplace for artworks) declared Engström as the artist to have received the largest increases in purchase enquiries in the last quarter of 2022. “I couldn’t even wrap my head around it,” she says. “I get DMs and messages, but it’s not, like, a storm of requests.”

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Speaking of DMs, since that very first sale, Instagram continues to be a source of Engström’s success. Her following started to grow before her practise took off. “My followers are a lot of young women, and I think they were just curious about my lifestyle and that I had quit my day job to pursue art full-time,” she says, adding that at the time, she didn’t even tell her parents that she had quit. “I didn’t have any money and I was willing to live so uncomfortably just to do what I wanted to do, and I think that inspired people.” She’ll occasionally receive a message from a woman who’s been with her from the start, congratulating her on her success.

In turn, Engström oft captions those aforementioned dance videos with little notes of encouragement for her followers (these days she has over 121,000). “It’s a way for me to help people,” she says. “I’m a self-taught painter and that confidence part is so hard. You want to quit your job and really pursue something and trust that you’re going to make it. So I really feel like my Instagram is geared towards those people who are going through it.”