Bengt Lindström (1925-2008) - The Faces

Very beautiful print on fine, laid paper.
Bengt Lindström.
No. 4/100
Signed in pencil.
Very limited edition.

Bengt Karl Erik Lindström (3 September 1925 – 29 January 2008) is an important Swedish visual artist who is often regarded as part of the CoBrA movement. He is one of Sweden's best-known contemporary artists, with a characteristic style of flamboyant, vivid colors and rough compositions built up with thick matter on canvas, often featuring distorted, tormented figures.

Lindström was born in 1925 in Storsjö kapell, Härjedalen, Sweden. In 1944 he moved to Stockholm to study there with the Swedish painter Isaac Grünewald.
In 1948 he went to France to further his training there in Paris under the leading artists of the time, such as André Lhote and Fernand Léger.
He remained in France, in Savigny-sur-Orge, for the rest of his artistic career, but he returned to Sundsvall at regular intervals.

Lindström is probably best known for his monumental achievements as murals and colorful sculptures. One of his most famous sculptures is the Y-sculpture at Midlanda Airport north of Sundsvall, Sweden. Lindström statue.

Bengt Lindström had his first solo exhibition in Sweden in 1954 at Gummessons Art Salon.
In the 1950s he came into contact with the CoBRA group in France. This group worked with colors as the main means of expression , something Lindström adopted in his later art.
He, however, mostly drew inspiration from Norse mythology, the Viking Age, and folk art from different countries, continents, and eras. In his painting, the being—the animal, monster, person, or god—often appears completely unexpectedly from the material. The shaping, the personification, forms the ultimate stage of creation, as in the stories in Genesis.
The ardor and the entrancing power of his oeuvre, whose meaning unfolds on the edge of the unexpected, the unconscious, bring us back to the beginning of time. As in myths, his painting, however, also reflects the deepest mechanisms that govern the human mind. The colors, the fused mass, and the spaces form contrasts that also interplay with each other, as the mind has from the very start played: with great oppositions in order to grasp the world.