Bengt Lindström (1925-2008) - The Faces

Extremely beautiful print on finely 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 belonging to the CoBrA movement. He is one of Sweden's best-known contemporary artists, with a distinctive style of flamboyant, intense colors and rough compositions with thick material applied to 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 refine his craft in Paris under leading artists of the time such as André Lhote and Fernand Léger. He remained in France, at Savigny-sur-Orge, for the rest of his artistic career but returned regularly to Sundsvall.

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

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 color as the primary means of expression, something that Lindström adopted in his later art.

However, he usually drew inspiration from Norse mythology, the Viking Age, and folk art from various countries, continents and eras. In his painting the being—whether beast, monster, human or god—often emerges completely unexpectedly from the material. The design, the personification, forms the ultimate stage of creation as in the narratives in Genesis.

The fiery intensity and the bewitching power of his oeuvre, whose meaning unfolds at the edge of the unexpected, the subconscious, bring us back to the dawn of time. As in myths, his painting also reflects the deepest mechanisms that govern the human mind. The colors, the fused mass and the spaces form contrasts that also play off one another, as the mind has since the very beginning played: with great oppositions to comprehend the world.