Anniversary exhibition

The retrospective exhibition Fragments in earth and time honors the 100th anniversary of one of the most influential Swedish artists of the post-war period. The wide selection of paintings, sculptures, and graphics shows Torsten Renqvist's (1924–2007) constant reexamination of imagery and motifs. The exhibition title refers to the artist's eye for the discarded: fragments of life lived on the outskirts of myth or swamp, as in the exhibition title FFragment in the earth, taken from a series of pictures made in 1960. The peripheral leitmotif of the nature studies recurs in variations in the intimate animal images' depictions of human relationships, in the graphics' focus on the movements of crisis in contemporary political "situations" or in the sculptural close-ups of humans before and beyond the cult of personality.

The critics of the debut exhibition in 1950 already noted the untimeliness of the approach. The odd mixture of “realism and expressiveness” did not fit into any existing concept of art, instead “neo-expressionism” was proposed. At the graphic debut in 1952, the critics saw what seemed new and unusual as being at once ascetically constructed and existentially challenging.

Renqvist came to be known as the artist of artists rather than the media. He wanted to work in the present, but distrusted the victorious side's narratives and the Americanized art scene of the postwar period. Instead, he turned to the less respected Eastern Europe and changed his material. Returning from an exhibition of paintings in Krakow (1966), he switched to sculpture. Polish art's staging of European ideas was in line with his cherished idea that "the odd art, off the beaten track, is the one that possesses the greatest power." The medieval idiom of Polish folk art had opened up for "a processing of ideas in the clearest the material”. The existential problems that had come to the surface in drawings, graphics and prose found their form upon his return to Kummelnäs in models made of cut-up sheet metal, tin and barbed iron. After that he switched to wood, which he, with some exceptions, remained with for the rest of his life.

In a note, Renqvist reflects on the timelessness as a breeding ground for images: “In the difficult situation of the one who passed, the good images we will yet see germinate. The one who passed has time. He finds himself in an almost full-scale humanity. He has got off the train in the middle of the line. There a new kind of adventure begins.”

In 2000, Torsten Renqvist was awarded the Sergel Prize by the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts.

Text Anna-Lena Renqvist.

With support from: The Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Stockholm Art Gallery and Galleri Andersson/Sandström.

Publication:
For the exhibition, the book has Fragments in earth and time published with support from the Sven Ivar and Siri Lind fund through the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts. 

Inaugural speech:
The exhibition Fragments in Earth and Time was inaugurated by Olle Granath on October 12. > To the recording

Written about the exhibition
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