From a Hornstull cafe to a New York residency: Swedish-Gambian artist Rugiyatou Jallow is one to watch

Throughout her artist residency in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, Rugiyatou Jallow noticed passersby reacting to her paintings as they observed her at work through the floor-to-ceiling storefront windows of the Mack Art Foundation. “I can imagine that for people who don’t really look at art that it’d be fun to watch somebody painting. So I decided to keep the blinds up and let people view me,” she says. It couldn’t have hurt that Jallow herself paints a striking figure, tall and slim with flawless skin the colour of toffee. When we meet, she’s clad in her typical studio wear of black, paint-splattered athleisure and matching Yeezy clogs.

As New York City looked at Jallow, she was looking back. Before the residency, which marked the Los Angeles-based artist’s first extended stay in the city, the settings of her paintings were vague. “I just felt so inspired walking around here,” she says. “I realised how much I love architecture... So I started trying it out in my work.”

The four new paintings she completed during her time in Greenpoint incorporate architectural backdrops while the foregrounds reflect more typical subject matter in Jallow’s practice to date: women rendered in a patchwork of skin tones, alluding to the artist’s mixed Swedish and Gambian ancestry. Within the figures appear winding paths of string, affixed to the canvas. As the string partitions the colours of their skin, it’s symbolic of the elegant labyrinth that is the artist’s biography as she channels her multi-faceted identity into her paintings.

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Jallow, 34, was born as one in a pair of fraternal twins in Stockholm, Sweden, where she was raised mainly by her dad and stepmother, both originally from Gambia. Her dad and Swedish biological mother got divorced when she and her twin, Isa, were barely toddlers. Her mother eventually moved to be with a different partner in the Irish countryside, where Jallow would spend summers and other breaks from school.

Her mum “loves nature” says Jallow. “She taught me everything about insects, birds, how to identify them, even by sound, and how to survive in the woods.” Over extended, educational hikes, she and her mother would forage for mushrooms, berries and other edible plants in the arboreal landscape near her property. “It was definitely such a contrast from growing up with my dad, who’s an imam – a Muslim priest. It was a very African household. My dad is very proud of being Gambian,” she says. She was expected to learn the language, Wolof, which she speaks fluently alongside English and Swedish.

Jallow’s dad hails from the Fulani tribe, the largest pastoral-nomadic tribe in West Africa, and one of the world’s biggest, too. “It was important to him for us to know our roots, to go to Gambia and visit, because we have relatives there,” Jallow says. Through her dad, she’s also the great-granddaughter of the former head chief of a tribe. “Since he passed away, my dad goes there a little bit more often to check in on the village and things like that,” she says of her regal lineage. The contrast between mother and father was stark. “My mom is super Swedish. And then my dad is very West African. Both values, but also cultural aspects. I love both. But it was always a struggle trying to struggle with either/or. I think I always thought it had to be either/or,” she says. “Then you realise, no, you’re 100 per cent both.”

The summer after high school graduation, she was trying to figure out her next steps in life while working at a cafe in the Stockholm neighbourhood of Hornstull. One day, a young man, who was half Caribbean and half Swedish, walked in with his dad and a group of friends. “It was the first time I had met an American,” says Jallow. “They basically sold me on LA, on how amazing it is with the weather, and I was convinced.”

Rather than sticking with her plan of continuing her education in Australia, she decided to apply to college in Southern California, eventually landing at Glendale College and, after some coursework in graphic design, graduated with a degree in computer animation in 2014. At the same time, she’d taken to painting on the weekends. “Some friends, and even an ex of mine, encouraged me to pursue art,” she says. Growing up in Sweden, the possibility of being a professional artist never really occurred to her as a viable career path.

She had no idea where to begin, however, and spent years forging connections and feeling out the territory. She eventually found a rhythm in her process to achieve the figurative yet otherworldly feel of her compositions. First, she makes collages in Photoshop. For faces, she finds visual references that she “distorts” on her canvases, elaborating that she’s “always loved doing really full lips”, and therefore will paint them thusly, usually making the nose a “little wider” as well. “It would be interesting to actually have somebody model for me, because I don’t know if somebody would be comfortable with me distorting their faces in that way,” she says. “So, I do prefer using random faces that I can find.”

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In 2021, her efforts began paying off when she landed a coveted space at Downtown LA’s Mohilef Studios. Through the artist Canyon Castor, who manages the studios, Jallow scored an introduction to the influential Swedish gallerist Carl Kostyál. Before she knew it, she’d cemented a solo exhibition at his namesake gallery back in Stockholm that opened in summer 2022, titled “Uppväxten i Sverige” – in English, “Growing Up In Sweden.”

It was at this juncture that Jallow’s professional artistic identity crystallised in front of a rapt audience of international collectors – Christine Mack, the patron behind the Greenpoint residency, among them. The total impact of her work easily conveyed a sense of wonder: from the female subjects, naturalistic in form but stylised in delicate, ethereal details, to different coloured swathes of skin cordoned off by physical threads as an illustration of Jallow’s multicultural heritage. Jallow’s scenes also tend to be rife with disembodied hands, representing, in the artist’s words, “an ancestral being” that serves to “protect you”.

Among the works that debuted at Carl Kostyál was 2022’s ‘Klarsynt’, the title of which translates to “clear-sighted”. Here, a woman clad in baggy jeans and an open blazer (with nothing underneath) leans against a chair as two pairs of hands – one white, one black – reach toward the figure’s face, obscuring her vision yet in motions that read as calming and comforting.

There are similar gestures to be found in ‘An Obscure Truth’ and ‘Strings of Protection’, both completed at the Mack Art Foundation early this year. In the former, two female figures embrace in front of a Neoclassical architectural niche; one is closing the other’s eyes with one hand, as she reaches up toward another hand emerging from out of frame. Two women again echo the pose in ‘Strings of Protection’, with one gently covering the other’s right eye.

Jallow again describes the distinctive positions of these hands, and the obscuring of her figures’ vision, as “protecting'' in nature. The motif could be found throughout all of her paintings up until a group of work that debuted last fall at New York’s Albertz Benda. “That was a very big step into a different journey: having these women go from feeling the need of being protected by the ancestors by covering their eyes and reality, to uncovering them and showing that they're comfortable,” she explains. “I realise I still want to play around with that aspect a little bit. Like with [‘An Obscure Truth’], it’s almost like she's her protector, shielding her from whatever's going on in the outside world.”

On a more personal level, that expression of protection emulates her relationship with her twin. “I've always obviously had a deep bond with my sister. She's my best friend,” Jallow says. “Growing up, she was that person that protected me. Because even though we're twins, she's almost like an older sister to me. I was a cry baby.” Her identity as a twin is also tied to why she never has more than two figures in a composition, she adds.

Though often ancient-deity-like in their energy, the personas across Jallow’s paintings have a strong sense of how to dress well in a contemporary fashion. “I do want it to be representative of women today, but still playing around with that aspect of time,” Jallow says. Take ‘An Obscure Truth’, in which the more dominant figure dons a green baggy, belted jacket with a matching bustier and denim skirt. The other figure wears a tunic – a style choice echoing the architectural backdrop.

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Jallow’s tenure at the Mack residency also gave her a new lease on gender politics. The architectural facades she’d incorporated, she realised, were both “built by men and also a lot of times in the past served as places for men only”. “Yet I have these beautiful strong present day women in front of these structures, basically playing around with the past and the present,” she says. The current US political climate, marred by retrograde abortion laws, also inspired her commitment to, with future work, delve more into the “subject of gender, outside of the already obvious story of what it is to be a mixed-slash-biracial woman”.

More broadly, she hopes her subjects resound more widely to viewers with unconventional backstories. “It doesn't necessarily have to be like, ‘Oh, I'm a mixed woman.’ But even somebody who is going through different ethnicities or cultural aspects that they're struggling with, trying to identify with either/or,” she says. “I think there's so many people that I've seen that can actually identify with the story behind this.”