Lena Cronqvist

Lena Cronqvist's art stems from personal experiences and becomes a reflection for the viewer. The 1960s painting with pastose and vibrant colors presents impressions from everyday scenes and from trips to Greece and Mexico, among other places. She traveled with her husband Göran Tunström. The couple had married in 1964, the same year that Cronqvist completed his studies at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm. During one of the trips, when they rented an apartment in San Cristóbal in Mexico, Tunström fell ill with jaundice and the planned return trip by freighter had to be delayed. While waiting for her husband to recover, Cronqvist went to one of the villages a little further south, Amatenango, and was given sculptural clay by the locals. Here, several small clay figures were added and she also had to burn them in the pottery 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 from the beginning. The small figures also reveal that the curiously playful was always there. The clear light and the strong Greek and Mexican colours made an impression and both the colour scheme and the figures in Cronqvist's painting stood in clear contrast to the formal and abstract trends that permeated contemporary art and academic painting during the 1960s. Lena Cronqvist went her own way from the beginning.

The poster art of the 1970s and the politicization of the art scene feel distant in the encounter with Cronqvist's intimate and existential depictions from the same time. The private and personal are the core of the artist's production, which during this time revolves around family, loneliness, hospital stays, the perceived isolation of motherhood from the outside world and the relationship to sick and aging parents. Added to this is 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Madonnas, and then Cronqvist paints The Betrothal, where the Arnolfini couple in Jan van Eyck's painting from 1434 have been replaced by the artist herself and her husband. By painting her way through her own experiences, Cronqvist reaches something deeply universal. As if the most private becomes that in which the viewer is allowed to rest and at the same time have their own experiences confirmed. We are all equal before the extremes and great events of life and it is a comfort to share it 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 color changes of the vegetation from light green sprouting spring greenery to saturated and colorful late summer, depicted peaked summer clouds and sheer August veils over bays and bumpy rocks. Here she met Inge Schiöler and found in him a kindred spirit in her love of the barren coastal landscape. Perhaps these landscape paintings were from the beginning a way for the artist to rest her eyes and let her gaze seek the stillness on the horizon. To see the colors beyond the motifs. Landscapes have ever since been a recurring element and a constant companion in Cronqvist's world of motifs. Through times of youthful zeal, family formation, introspection, dreams, play, grief, hopes and loss of a life partner, the ever-changing landscape of the Bohuslän coast 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 small child explores the world around them and learns the norms of society, 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 reflections, curiously peer through glass domes, put mom and dad dolls to bed, play in pairs or on their own, jump rope and make faces. The girls are timeless, as is play – this in-between existence of fantasy and the deepest seriousness. Some girls appear in Cronqvist's paintings as early as the 1970s and 1980s, and then with both a serious and calm expression. But in the 1990s something happens. Now the little girls are taking up more space and instead they radiate life and playfulness. Sometimes the girls act against a checkered background, as in the paintings created during and after the Cronqvists/Tunströms' time in New York. The grid and bright colors bring to mind both Mondrian's painting and the geometric layout 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 a sense of self. They play and observe, just as they do in the paintings. They grimace, they are snub-nosed and turn their faces grimly towards the world. They play pranks on us and on 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, deeply personal grief and loss or collective grief, such as that of a population with war in their recent memory, possess a special form of drastic humor. That these people who are close to the pain are also much closer to laughter. Cronqvist has made no secret of the trials life has thrown at her and perhaps that is why play has become so central to her art. Perhaps play 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 faces and stick out their tongues at us. The artist uses herself as a model, practical as she is always at hand, to work on, grimace, tease, make ugly, terrify and refine. One moment we encounter grave seriousness, only to be met in the next face by a sly laugh.

After her husband's death in 2000, the colour scheme in the paintings changes. The impact of grief produces dark and saturated colours. And it becomes clear that for the artist, painting is essential to life. Grief makes a person mute, takes their words away. But through the canvas, the paint and the brushes, Cronqvist can come closer to expressing the abyss that the loss meant. Gradually, other tones creep back into the palette. Cronqvist makes a series of self-portraits where a playfulness once again rests on her smile. She appears against a two-part background, both sitting with her legs crossed and standing, holding hand puppets and marionettes. She smiles and poses and the little puppets grimace both impatiently and happily as if life is reminding itself again. Here the children are not playing on their own, here it is the artist who directs. And she is having fun.

Around 2010, a series of paintings inspired by Giotto's early Renaissance painting was added. Some of the girls have been given angel wings and are hovering above the others who are still on the ground. The girls on the ground look up in wonder at their winged sisters while they continue to play, dance and grimace. Life goes on.

The exhibition at the Academy of Fine Arts includes many of the artist's sculpture projects, including the girls with a parasol or a sunflower in their hands. These girls also appear in a series of smaller paintings. The self-evident expression that was present in the earliest bronzes is found in these sculptures and paintings, where the girls continue to view the world with a mixture of wonder and self-evidentness. In addition to the bronze sculptures, several of the artist's ceramic works are also on display.

In recent years, Lena Cronqvist has been forced to come to terms with initially declining and now lost vision. 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, ground. In the contrast between the dark and the light, she was still able to perceive the motif before her vision completely disappeared. The girls' lines and profiles also seem to be 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 self-evident clarity. Perhaps it is the case that the girls have always existed and always will exist. Perhaps they represent possibilities. For what is born in play and is not yet set in stone by society's norms drives humanity forward. In play, boundaries can be pushed and new paths can be trodden. It is through play that children can sculpt their living conditions, in the same way that Cronqvist has relentlessly sculpted his own existence over the course of a lifetime through expression in colors, lines, bronze and ceramics.

A key part of the exhibition is devoted to the artist's graphic production. With sharpness, Cronqvist has mastered everything from the precision of his etchings to the painterly grayscale of his 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 the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts, Stockholm (1959-1964). She is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts. Cronqvist has had numerous solo exhibitions in Sweden and abroad and is widely represented, including at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, Gothenburg Museum of Art, Malmö Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo, Norrköping Museum of Art, Borås Museum of Art, Värmlands Museum, Karlstad, to name a few.