Loyal founders Martin Lilja and Amy Giunta are choosing to slow down. In Lund, a quiet university town in southern Sweden, the gallery now occupies a 19th-century chapel. Exhibitions will unfold in the historic brick building, through the massive green church doors, and under softened light filtering through stained-glass windows.
“The scale, the light, and the verticality all invite a different kind of exhibition-making,” Giunta told Artsy of the space, designed by Swedish architect Helgo Zettervall. “It allows for things to slow down a bit, and the work can hold space rather than compete for it.… For the artists, it creates an opportunity to think beyond standard gallery formats.”
Giunta described the Swedish art scene as “strong” but happening within a small, occasionally insular community. For the gallerists, who had been based in Stockholm for two decades, the chapel “offers a shift in pace and perspective.” “It’s a space where the work can expand and settle differently, and where exhibitions can unfold more slowly,” she said.
The move follows two decades in Stockholm, where Loyal built a reputation as a reliable engine for discovering new talent. The two gallerists share a propensity for experimentation, evident in their latest move and their consistently exciting programming. Some of the early solo shows mounted at their previous Stockholm space featured now-widely known artists Eddie Martinez, Katherine Bernhardt, and Wes Lang.
How Loyal’s publishing roots laid its tastemaking foundations
Loyal started as a magazine, launched by Lilja in 2000. Giunta, who was living in New York, met Lilja during a trip to Stockholm the next year. “We quickly found that we shared a similar sensibility and way of working: similar enough to see eye to eye, and different enough to keep it exciting and surprising,” she told Artsy. In 2001, Lilja joined the magazine, which had a dedicated following for its edgy arts and culture–focused reporting. Publishing offered Lilja and Giunta a way into culture that felt self-determined and accessible. “It was a way of paying attention and forming a point of view,” Lilja said.
By 2005, opening a gallery felt like the right next move, and it opened a space in Stockholm’s Vasastan neighborhood. “At a certain point, we realized that what we were really doing was building relationships with artists and curating what were essentially exhibitions in print,” Giunta said. “The magazine was one way of doing that, but the gallery became a more direct way to continue that conversation. It wasn’t a strategic shift so much as a natural progression.”
That editorial instinct remained a key part of the gallery’s programming. “Instead of pages, it became exhibitions. Instead of documenting, we were now responsible for context, for how the work meets the audience,” Lilja said. But even as it evolved, the gallery has remained intentionally lean and is operated almost exclusively by the two founders. The approach, they say, “allowed us to stay very close to both artists and collectors, and to build something that feels consistent over time rather than programmatic.”
Staying Loyal to its artists
La Tierra de la Culebra, 2025
Michelle Blade
Loyal
Magic Hour Eze, 2025
Daniel Heidkamp
Loyal
Some artists that the gallerists have worked with began in the magazine days, including Brian Belott, a New York–based performer and artist. They’ve continued to add artists to the roster, including now-stalwart artists like Michelle Blade and Daniel Heidkamp.
“Loyal has always been about building long-term relationships with artists and staying close to the work as it develops over time,” Lilja said. “The mission is to create the right conditions for artists to take risks, evolve, and be seen in a focused way.”
Conduct, 2025
Zoé Blue M.
Loyal
Old Tree, 2026
Ross Caliendo
Loyal
This mission now extends across continents. While the gallery is grounded in Sweden, its program is also shaped by the gallerists’ ties to London, New York, and especially Los Angeles, where Lilja and Giunta live for a quarter of the year. In 2002, artist and curator Rich Jacobs connected the gallerists with a group of artists and became a part of their lives.
“We would go for three months every winter to escape Sweden’s darkest days and be around the sun and the dynamic art scene,” said Giunta. “In Los Angeles, we met Mario Ayala, and things kept building from there as connections continued to grow, with artists like Chanel Khoury, Alex Gardner, Zoé Blue M, and Ross Caliendo,” she said.
A gallery program split between L.A. and Lund
Now, the gallery hosts an annual pop-up at the El Royale apartment buildings during L.A. Art Week in February. “It also allows us to bring together artists in a way that feels specific to that context, rather than replicating what we do in Sweden,” Lilja said. The first exhibition took place in 2023; it featured 13 artists, including Michelle Blade and Andrea Marie Breiling, and was situated within the iconic William Douglas Lee–designed parlor. This year, they held the first of a two-parter, “Infinite Planes High,” a show featuring artists whose work conceptually engages with expansiveness. Part two, which consecrated the Lund space, opened in mid-March.
“Moving between Sweden and L.A. creates a dialogue between contexts that are quite different in energy and scale,” said Giunta. That tension is good. It keeps things from becoming too fixed and allows artists to be seen in multiple frameworks. So ‘local’ becomes something you build through repetition and trust, not just where you’re based.”
This rethinking comes as the gallery looks to centralize its efforts. After years in Stockholm, jumping across several spaces across the city, most recently a townhouse on Odengatan (coincidentally designed by Zettervall’s son, Folke), the gallerists felt it was time to change things up.
Lund felt like a better use of resources, time, and energy, “where we have full control over context and presentation,” Giunta said, pointing to the legendary Lund gallerist Anders Tornberg, who, between 1970 and 1990, featured notable New York artists including Robert Rauschenberg, Sol LeWitt, and Richard Serra.
The chapel in Lund brings the gallery’s ethos into sharper focus. As with the exhibition at El Royale, the work is set in direct dialogue with the building. This setting illuminates the bright, explosive colors that characterize most of this group show, such as Jean Nagai’s Goat Mountain (2025), a textured pumice-on-canvas work that evokes a burning flame, or Alice Faloretti’s psychedelic landscape, Mirage #2 (2025). Compared to its first iteration in L.A., this show feels less compressed, bending to the chapel’s rhythm while still linking the gallery’s program across continents.
While the formats shift, the approach remains the same: to bring work into contact with an audience in a way that is carefully “edited,” where, as Giunta says, “relationships can develop in a way that felt more our own.”
