Lena Cronqvist

Lena Cronqvist's art emerges from the personally experienced and becomes reflections for the viewer. The 1960s painting with pastos and vibrant colors shows impressions from everyday scenes and from travels in, among other places, Greece and Mexico. She traveled with her husband Göran Tunström. The couple had married in 1964, the same year that Cronqvist finished his studies at Kungl. Stockholm School of Art. During one of the trips, when they rented an apartment in San Cristóbal in Mexico, Tunström fell ill with jaundice and the trip home, which was planned by freighter, had to be delayed. While waiting for her husband's recovery, Cronqvist went to one of the villages a little to the south, Amatenango, and was given sculpture clay by the locals. Here several small clay figurines were added and she also had to burn them in the ceramic fire which was set up in the middle of the village street, by women dressed in beautiful and colorful costumes. The artist still has some of these small sculptures, and they testify that the form and the pasty - the physical - were important right from the start. The little figures also gossip that the curiously playful has always been there. The clear light and the strong Greek and Mexican colors made an impression and both the color and the figures in Cronqvist's painting stood in clear contrast to the formal and abstract currents that permeated contemporary art and academic painting in the 1960s. Lena Cronqvist went her own way right from the start.

The poster art and politicization of the art scene of the 1970s feels distant in the encounter with Cronqvist's intimate and existential depictions from the same time. The private and personal is at the core of the artist's production, which during this time revolves around family, loneliness, hospital stays, motherhood's perceived isolation from the outside world and the relationship with sick and aging parents. To this is added the series of paintings called Madonnas and then Cronqvist paints The Betrothal, where the Arnolfini couple in Jan van Eyck's painting from 1434 have been replaced by the artist himself and her husband. By painting his way through his own experiences, Cronqvist reaches something deeply universal. As if the most private becomes what the viewer is allowed to rest in and at the same time have their own experiences confirmed. We are all equal in the face of life's extremes and great events, and it is a comfort to share that in Cronqvist's painterly universe.

Despite the many and long trips around the world, Koster was early on, and probably still is, Lena Cronqvist's place on earth. Here she has rowed out to the coves and islands under the summer sun, painted the sea, the sky, the rocks, the reeds, the seaweed and the geese on the waves. She has followed the vegetation's color shifts from bright green budding spring greenery to saturated and colorful late summer, depicting peaked summer clouds and sheer August veils over bays and bumpy rocks. Here she met Inge Schiöler and found in him a relative in her love of the rugged coastal landscape. Perhaps these landscape paintings were from the beginning a way for the artist to rest his eyes and let his gaze seek the stillness of the horizon. Get to see the colors beyond the motifs. Ever since then, landscapes have been a recurring feature and a constant companion in Cronqvist's world of motifs. Through times of youthful zeal, family formation, introspection, dreams, play, sadness, hopes and the loss of a life partner, the ever-changing landscape of Bohuskusten has offered the artist a refuge.

Physical places may have been important to Lena Cronqvist, but play seems to be at least as important. Play, through which the young child explores the outside world and learns society's norms, tests boundaries and experiments, also becomes a way of relating to the world. In Cronqvist's world of motifs, the children are usually girls who play with dolls, bathe in the sea and in tubs, are accompanied by dogs, cats and gorillas, play with mirrors and mirror images, curiously look through glass cups, put down mother and father dolls, play in pairs or on his own, jumping rope and grimacing. The girls are timeless, as is the game – this interworld existence of fantasy and deepest seriousness. A few girls appear in Cronqvist's paintings as early as the 1970s and 1980s, and then with both a serious and quiet look. But in the 1990s, something happens. Now the little girls increasingly take up space and instead radiate life and playfulness. Sometimes the girls act against a checkered background, as in the paintings created during and after the Cronqvist/Tunström couple's time in New York. The grid and the bright colors bring to mind both Mondrian's painting and the geometric spread of the city's streets.

During her stay in New York, Lena Cronqvist casts a series of sculptures. They are small in size, these early girls in bronze. Later, they will grow in size, but never in age. They remain timeless children who take on the world with ease. They play and watch, just like they do in the paintings. They grimace, they are blunt-nosed and turn their faces fiercely towards the world. They play tricks both with us and with each other, as if trying to convince us not to take everything so seriously. Because death comes anyway, mercilessly and without sparing anyone. So why not dare, when we are still alive and breathing? It is said that people who have experienced a lot of grief, deep personal grief and loss or collective grief as in a population with the war in the immediate memory, possess a special form of drastic humor. That these people with the pain close also have much closer to laughter. Cronqvist has made no secret of the trials life has offered her and perhaps that is why play has become so central to her art. Perhaps the game has become a way of relating to blackness? Her artistry offers great humor. We are allowed to laugh at the faces that, in both sculptural and painterly form, make ugly grimaces and stick out their tongues at us. The artist uses herself as a model, practical as she is always at hand, to labor, grimace, tease, disfigure, terrify and refine. One moment we meet grave wolves, only to be met in the next face by an elusive laugh.

After her husband's death in 2000, the color of the paintings changes. The influence of grief produces dark and saturated colors. And it becomes clear that for the artist, painting is vital. Sorrow makes man mute, takes his word. But through the canvas, the paint and the brushes, Cronqvist can approach an expression of the depth of the abyss that the loss meant. Eventually, other tones creep back into the palette. Cronqvist makes a series of self-portraits where a playfulness again rests over her smile. She figures against a two-part background, both sitting cross-legged and standing, holding hand puppets and marionettes. She smiles and poses and the little dolls grimace both impatiently and happily as if life is reminding them again. Here the children do not play on their own, here the artist directs. And she's having fun.

In the years around 2010, a series of paintings inspired by Giotto's early Renaissance painting is added. Some of the girls have gained angel wings and are hovering over the others who are still on the ground. Wondering, the girls on the ground look up at their winged sisters as they continue to play, dance and grimace. Life goes on.

The exhibition at the Art Academy includes many of the artist's sculpture projects, including the girls with a parasol or a sunflower in hand. These girls also appear in a series of smaller paintings. The self-evident expression that was found in the very earliest bronzes is found in these sculptures and paintings where the girls continue to look at the world with a mixture of wonder and obviousness. In addition to bronze sculptures, several of the artist's ceramic works are also displayed.

In recent years, Lena Cronqvist has been forced to come to terms with first a declining and now lost sight. With the same unwavering will to express herself, however, she has painted a series of works with light acrylic pencil against a dark blue, sometimes almost black, background. In the contrast between the dark and the light, she could still perceive the subject before her vision completely disappeared. The girls' lines and profiles also seem to exist in the artist's hand, in her muscle memory. She knows them well and their movements are portrayed in these last paintings with unbroken lines and with clarity. Maybe it's the case that the girls have always existed and always will exist. Perhaps they represent opportunities. For what is born in play and not yet set in stone by society's norms, humanity moves forward. In play, boundaries can be pushed and new paths trodden. It is in play that the children can sculpt their living conditions, in the same way that Cronqvist, over a lifetime, relentlessly sculpted his own existence through expression in colors as well as in lines, bronze and ceramics.

A key part of the exhibition is dedicated to the artist's graphic production. With sharpness, Cronqvist has mastered everything from the precision of the etchings to the painting gray scale of the aquatints and it is a joy to be able to present a generous selection from six decades together with a series of drawings.

Lena Cronqvist (born 1938 in Karlstad) lives and works in Stockholm and at Koster. She received her artistic education at Konstfack, Stockholm (1958-1959) and at Kungl. Academy of Arts, Stockholm (1959-1964). She is a member of the Royal Academy of the Liberal Arts. Cronqvist has had countless solo exhibitions in Sweden and abroad and she is richly represented, including at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, Gothenburg Art Museum, Malmö Art Museum, Museum for Contemporary Art, Oslo, Norrköping Art Museum, Borås Art Museum, Värmland Museum, Karlstad , to mention a few.