Artist biography
Sanna Fried is a painter based between Mexico City and Stockholm. Sanna Fried's practice is centered around portraits, painted with oil on canvas, with what she calls Magical realism. She works in familiar environments, but with magical aspects enhancing the everyday experience. The viewer is invited to reflect and feel curiosity. This becomes a way for Fried to explore deeper themes, existential questions, societal issues, and subconscious emotions. Fried is a storyteller and sees it as her artistic mission to- through her work, offering space for honest conversations.
Driven by a desire to tell unique and untold stories — often with women, or her self, in the centerpiece — Fried uses painting as a way to explore larger themes. The portraits Fried creates are intimate, raw, and often nude — revealing more than skin. They speak of resilience, mental health, cultural belonging, and emotional truth. Her self-portraits in particular function as quiet acts of defiance, grief, and reclamation. Themes of exposure, vulnerability, and feminine power recur across her work.
Fried’s travels and longer residencies across Costa Rica, The Middle East, Zanzibar, Kenya, and Mexico have significantly influenced her practice, infusing her work with a sensitivity to environment, material, and human presence.
Fried spent nearly a decade in New York City (2011–2020), working as a fashion stylist with Vogue US, Vogue Italia, Vera Wang, Cartier, Missoni, and others.This background has sharpened her visual language, but rather than reproduce fashion ideals, she uses her knowledge to challenge, explore and play with traditional ideas of what an image is. Her paintings subvert the polished surfaces of fashion photography, embracing imperfection, emotional depth, and human complexity.
Sanna Fried has exhibited extensively in group shows in Mexico. In 2023, she held her second solo show in Stockholm, a personal tribute of paintings, and a panel discussion, to her grandmother Hédi Fried — an author and Holocaust survivor — which was featured in Sweden's most read morning paper Dagens Nyheter and on national television (TV4 Morgon).
Her work is held in private collections across Sweden, Portugal, Turkey, Mexico, and the U.S. In 2025, she will participate in group exhibitions with Galleri Rich (Stockholm) and the Cathedral of Visby, and Engelbrekts Cathedral in Stockholm.
Fried is also the founder of a nonprofit initiative providing eyeglasses to young women in the arts, which she has operated in Eastern Africa and is now bringing to Mexico.
Artist statement
I approach painting as a kind of visual alchemy, where staged images evolve into emotionally charged, symbolic portraits. My practice is anchored in realism, but layered with symbolism, emotional depth, and touches of the occult. The result is something that feels familiar yet charged with a kind of quiet magic.
My process begins with photography — often using my phone to shoot carefully staged compositions of my subjects, or myself. Having worked for years in fashion, I approach painting with a heightened awareness of pose, detail, styling, and narrative. I treat each portrait like a composed emotionally specific scene.
The images I create with the camera becomes the blueprint for a painting that takes between 40–70 hours to complete. I prime my canvas with acrylic paint, often in red or yellow tones. I sometimes leave parts of the acrylic exposed, creating depth and contrast.
Then I build up slow, thin layers of oil, inspired by Renaissance painting techniques. My focus is on capturing emotions, light, skin, and energy. My process is slow, painting oil in thin layers allows me to meticulously observe and understand both my subjects and myself.
Through painting, I attempt to observe and understand. Diagnosed as atypical, I’ve long found social nuance elusive, painting becomes my way of studying and connecting with others. My portraits are acts of deep observation: not just of faces and bodies, but of emotional landscapes, cultural codes, and layered identities.