Fia Backstrom

Artist’s website

Her work refuses fixity of images or categories; virtually impossible to characterize, her practice encompasses producing printed matter and merchandise-based items, arrangements and displays, creating objects, writing texts, and initiating gatherings and events. Working within a system that favors the branding of individual identity and style as an artistic signature, Backström acknowledges the elusiveness of her practice in a conversation with Wade Guyton for North Drive Press: “There is this great movie title for a film with Leonardo DiCaprio called Catch Me If You Can . . . about a con artist who always manages to escape. All artists are sort of like con artists.”

It is simultaneously studio and bed in one,’’ she says. But she has silence, solitude and a full view of the sky. Backstrom’s question-mark chaise was part of her summer show, ‘‘that social space between speaking and meaning,’’ at White Columns, and the wallpaper is her 2003 work ‘‘1.000.000 people incl. satellite suburbs.

Portrait of the artist

Fia Backström, born in Stockholm, was educated at University of Stockholm and Konstfack University College of Arts Crafts and Design (Stockholm) and at Columbia University (New York). For over the past ten years Backstöm has lived and worked in New York…