Torsten Andersson (1926–2009) is one of the most distinctive painters in Swedish post-war art. For more than sixty years, he persistently tested the possibilities and limits of painting – between abstraction and realism, image and object, tradition and a language that must constantly be reinvented.

His relationship with the Academy of Fine Arts was also institutional. In 1960, at the age of only 34, he was appointed professor at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and in 1961 he was elected as a member of the Academy of Fine Arts. Until 1965 he combined both roles. At that time, the academy and art education were still closely intertwined: the Academy of Fine Arts had its teaching in the Academy of Fine Arts building at Fredsgatan 12, where it remained until it moved to Skeppsholmen in 1995.

The exhibition shows The Identity Frieze in its entirety: 52 paintings from 1967 to 2006, brought together by Andersson himself as an artistic testament. The works, which for a long time surrounded him in his studio in Benarp, were arranged in twelve phases and provided with his own handwritten comments. He called them “memory pictures” – points of orientation in a lifelong search for the enigmatic common thread that united his artistry. Here image and word, repetition and variation, memory and identity meet.

Publications The Identity Frieze. 52 Memory Images reproduces Andersson's own document in facsimile, with his characteristic handwriting and photographs of the paintings taken in the studio. It was published in 2011 by Bokförlaget Langenskiöld with an essay by Magnus Bons.

The title deliberately alludes to Edvard Munch's The Life Frieze. As with Munch, it is not a question of independent works, but of a coherent suite where the paintings illuminate each other. For Andersson, the frieze also became a defense of art's anchoring in personal experience and a resistance to the work of art as an "isolated cut flower". The exhibition provides a rare opportunity to encounter his art as he himself ultimately wanted to see it: as a coherent work about painting, memory and identity.