ERM · Visual artist · Stockholm
Paintings, objects and moving images from an imagined popular culture. An ongoing project by ERM.
Selected works
01 / SELECTED WORKS
Painting, sculpture and moving image · 2025–2026
02 / IN THE STUDIO
The studio is where the graphic world of Forgotten Timeline takes on a physical presence. ERM moves between canvases, painted objects and screen-based work, testing how a character changes with its scale and surroundings. Close up, the painted surfaces reveal marks and irregularities that sit alongside the clarity of the outlines.
LOST TRANSMISSION
Lost Transmission presents a looped video on a CRT television. Robot figures appear through colour and signal interference, suggesting a broadcast with a history of its own. The television becomes a physical artefact within Forgotten Timeline: a screen carrying images from the same imagined culture as the paintings and objects around it.
“I am interested in the moment when something invented begins to feel remembered.”
Forgotten Timeline is a world I build through painting, sculpture, objects and moving image. I think of each work as a fragment of a popular culture that never existed: a character, a product or a broadcast that seems to have arrived from another history.
I draw on the comics, animation, advertising and television I grew up with in the 1980s and 1990s. Their colours, rhythms and ways of telling stories have stayed with me. I return to that visual language to explore how an image can feel familiar before we know what we are looking at, and how easily recognition can turn into a sense of memory.
The Robos give this world its inhabitants. They move between canvases, painted boxes, sculptural bodies and screens. I am interested in what happens to a figure as it moves between these forms. A face on a canvas meets the viewer differently from an object that occupies the same room. Repetition establishes a connection, while changes in scale and material make each encounter distinct.
The bright colours and direct graphic language invite an immediate response. Beneath that first encounter, I leave the history incomplete. A package suggests a product, a screen suggests a programme, and a recurring character suggests stories beyond the work itself. I want to leave enough space for viewers to bring their own memories to this invented world.
04 / THE ROBOS
The Robos are the four recurring figures at the centre of Forgotten Timeline.
Robo Zero, Robo Pop, Rob and Robozilla connect its paintings, objects and transmissions. Each brings a different temperament: stillness, joy, energy and power. Their appearances shift across materials and formats, like fragments of a cast whose wider story is only partly remembered.
Stillness / repetition
With closed eyes and a quiet expression, Zero brings a sense of stillness to the world. The figure returns in repeated portraits, fragmented paintings and sculptural forms, where changes in colour, surface and scale give the same face a different presence.
Joy / popular culture
Wide-eyed and cheerful, Pop carries the playful appeal of an imagined popular culture. The figure appears on painted packaging, in graphic images and on screen, suggesting a familiar mascot from products and programmes that never existed.
Energy / interruption
Rob brings restless, electric energy. Movement, collisions and bursts of colour shape the figure’s presence in paintings and fragmented compositions, as if a single moment had been pulled from a larger sequence.
Scale / power
The giant of the four, Robozilla carries the force of a creature from an imagined kaiju film. In large paintings and scenes of the city, the figure turns a playful graphic language into something imposing, hovering between spectacle and disruption.
05 / EXHIBITION VIEW
Solo exhibition · Stockholm · June 2026
06 / FURTHER WORKS
07 / NEW WORKS
Mixed media on canvas · 2026
08 / EXHIBITIONS
ONGOING / STOCKHOLM
UPCOMING / STOCKHOLM
Exhibition & live painting · HAS / Helix Art Space · Stockholm · 1 October 2026
Egenart · Stockholm
Solo exhibition · HAS / Helix Art Space · Stockholm
Artist Arena Market · Gothenburg
Artportable Showroom & Gallery · Stockholm
Solo exhibition · Galleri 86 · Stockholm
09 / COLLABORATIONS
Through The 3rd Public, ERM works with Mav and Earz on collaborative pieces and live painting. The artists bring their own visual languages to shared work, making and responding to one another in front of an audience.
Instagram / @the3rdpublic
10 / ABOUT ERM
ERM (Emanuel Ringborg Mankert) is a Swedish visual artist based in Stockholm, working across painting, sculpture, objects and moving image.
His practice draws on the graphic intensity of comics, the repetition of advertising and the characters that populate popular culture. Bold outlines, saturated colour and a recurring cast of robots form a visual language that moves between images and physical objects. Its humour and apparent simplicity make room for questions about memory, recognition and the emotional attachments people form to invented figures.
Forgotten Timeline is the ongoing world at the centre of his work. Paintings, oversized packaging, sculptural figures and fictional broadcasts become traces of a cultural history assembled by the artist. The works offer different ways into that history, from an encounter with a single character to an installation in which images, objects and screens occupy the same space.
ERM brings a background in creative direction and brand strategy to his art. His familiarity with how images attract attention and acquire meaning informs the work, while the studio gives him space to make those familiar visual codes strange, ambiguous and personal.
Contact the studio