MATILDA FORSBERG
In Each Other’s Sun
March 6 - April 4, 2026
Reception:
March 6, 2026 6-8 PM

McBride / Dillman is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new paintings by Matilda Forsberg, created during her residency at dot.ateliers in Accra, Ghana opening March 6 and running through April 4, 2026. This body of work marks a painterly shift in the artist’s practice, which has long drawn from her own story of migration and from the complexities of raising a multiracial child in a country where belonging is often contested. Forsberg’s paintings trace the fragile boundaries between past and present, self and place, inheritance and reinvention. 

For much of her career, Forsberg has drawn from old family photographs sourced from relatives and friends, transforming these personal archives into paintings that honor overlooked histories and shared experiences. Her work has long served as a site of introspection—where memory, intuition, and lived experience converge.

Her time in Accra catalyzed a profound shift. While her work remained centered on lived experience, she set aside the archive and began responding intuitively to the immediacy of her surroundings. Spontaneous photographs—taken while moving through markets, streets, and moments of daily exchange—became loose points of departure. The people of Accra, and the rhythms of the city itself, entered the paintings with intimacy and warmth. This turn toward present-tense figuration grounded the work in sensation: what it feels like to inhabit a place fully, to witness it with openness and humility.

Working at a smaller scale, Forsberg adopted an intuitive, rapid process that allowed for greater openness and experimentation. She used photographs as loose references rather than fixed guides - a relinquishing of exactness in favor of emotional clarity. The resulting paintings are gestural, immediate, and vibrantly alive, holding presence without trying to pin it down.

This new body of work resonates against the backdrop of the increasingly restrictive and punitive landscape of U.S. immigration policy. Forsberg’s lived experience as a migrant—and as the mother of a child whose identity complicates the nation’s narrow narratives of belonging—infuses her practice with a quiet but insistent political charge. Her paintings reject the abstractions of policy and instead foreground the individuals whose lives are shaped, constrained, or rendered precarious by them. In turning her attention to Accra’s everyday encounters, she underscores a universal truth: that the dignity of human experience is not determined by borders, and that the stories shaping a person’s life cannot be contained by the systems that attempt to categorize them. The work becomes a reminder that migration is not simply a political issue, but a profoundly human one—rooted in care, survival, and the desire to be seen.

The paintings that emerged from her time in Ghana form a vivid, tender portrait of Accra—its people, its traditions, and the fleeting exchanges that make a place feel like a momentary home. Seen through Forsberg’s eyes, the city becomes a site of encounter and transformation, a place that expanded her sense of presence and possibility.

Matilda Forsberg is a Swedish artist based in New Jersey. Her paintings engage with family, migration, and memory. Her work has been exhibited at venues such as the dot.ateliers Foundation (Accra, Ghana), Shin Gallery (New York, NY), Deanna Evans Projects (Brooklyn, NY), Akwabaa Gallery (Newark, NJ), and the New Jersey State Museum (Trenton, NJ). In 2020, she was featured in The Immigrant Artist Biennial, Mother Tongue. Forsberg is a recipient of the 2024 New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship and other grants, including the 2021 City of Newark/Newark Arts Creative Catalyst Fund Grant, and the 2020 Newark Art Accelerator grant, jointly awarded by Project for Empty Space and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. She has completed several residencies, such as dot.ateliers (2025), the Potato Farm Project (2024), La Fourchette De Rôze Residency (2023), and Liquitex (2021). Her work has appeared in publications like New American Paintings, Art Spiel, and Juxtapoz Magazine. Forsberg holds a BFA in Painting from Pacific Northwest College of Art.