Engström was born in Örebro, Sweden, in 1989. A self-taught artist, after graduating from Parsons School of Design in 2009, she worked as a fashion assistant in New York, but the positive response she received from posting her drawings of her alter ego, the voluptuous female figure she called ‘Husa’ (housemaid in Swedish, but chosen more because she liked the sound of the word) persuaded her to leave the fashion world behind and make art in earnest. Formerly based in Brooklyn, she later landed in Los Angeles and has divided her time between there and her homeland Sweden ever since.
Her bucolic, metaphysical landscapes celebrate the healing properties of Mother Nature. Their trippy, hallucinogenic palette and voluptuous curving forms realised in a sorbet-coloured palette channel the erotic charge of Georgia O’Keeffe while their spiritual energy owes much to her fellow Swede Hilma Af Klint. Hailed as both “feminist and fecund”, Engström’s art offers an uplifting riff on millennial preoccupations spawned from the digital realm, from body shaming to the cult of the self.