Emergency services were called to the centre of Angered at around 10pm, where they discovered the man, who had been severely injured.
Police said that the victim had been shot, but gave few details about the nature of the attack other than to say that they were treating the case as an attempted murder.
“He was taken to hospital by ambulance. Now a technical examination [of the location] is happening,” Robert Ed, an assistant duty officer for Västra Götaland police told the TT newswire on Sunday evening.
Angered is a small town on the outskirts of Gothenburg municipality in west Sweden, which has already experienced deadly violence this year.
In April, a man in his 30s was killed in a shooting at a car park. Last week a man survived being shot in the mouth in the Hjällbo area of Angered.
The latest shooting took place just hours after Sweden’s Prime Minister made a keynote speech describing a “summer of unrest in Sweden” and calling on Swedes to stand up for their country, following a wave of violence that he said had been terrifying families in Sweden’s major cities.
Police have not commented on whether they believe Sunday's violence to be linked to recent gang crime in Gothenburg, where there have been a number of other high profile shootings in recent months, including an attack outside a restaurant which made global headlines.