Review: enigmatic art by Dick Bengtsson fascinates yet
Who was Dick Bengtsson? The question can be understood in two ways. Either you do not know at all who this mythical Swedish artist was. Or you know his art very well, but still wonder who he really was and what he wanted to say with his enigmatic works.
Maybe you can get some answers in the retrospective with Dick Bengtsson’s work that opened this weekend at Sven-Harry’s Art Museum in Stockholm. Here are some forty paintings by this legendary artist, now worshiped by both critics and art scientists as well as artist colleagues.
When Dick Bengtsson stood at his artistic top during the 1960s and 1970s, he had a more difficult-to-define status in Swedish art life. Not really insider, but not really outsider. His name gossips about the background in Stockholm working class, where American sounding first names such as Freddy, Conny and Tony were common.
Under a large part From life, Dick Bengtsson worked on the post, and initially painted his works at home on the living room floor, without direct contact with the art life of the time. In his biography there are also dark elements, such as depression, a tearful divorce and a fire in a former school in Hälsingland, used as a studio and where he periodically withdrew.
When the building caught fire, Bengtsson threw itself out the window and ended up on the laser, while several works were swallowed by the flames.
He was undoubtedly a stranger, largely self -taught, with an unskilled and own technology that commuted between a raw and a refined expression. But the qualities of his art did not go unnoticed, he eventually got both his own studio in Gamla Hagalund and state artist salary and a separate exhibition at the Moderna Museet in 1983.
The motives in their distinctive Works picked up Dick Bengtsson, mainly from art books and the popular press ads, and joined them in a collage-like style that preceded postmodernism’s quotation arts.
In one of his most well -known works (which unfortunately is missing in the exhibition), he simply painted from a street view by American artist Edward Hopper, with a trained hook cross in the lower left corner. In a painting that can lead the thoughts to the quirky pop artist Philip Guston, he has just as unexpectedly placed Albert Engström’s cartoon characters Kolingen and Bobban in a difficult -to -interpret spatiality.
The painting « Hitler and the Dream Kitchen », where the German dictator talks with a group of military during a thought bubble with a time-typical kitchen fittings from the 70s, is in direct dialogue with pop artist Richard Hamilton’s classic « Just what is that that makes today’s homes so diffrer, so appealing? ».
But Bengtsson could Just as well refer to art historical role models such as Lucas Cranach the older or for that matter the artist Hans Van Meegeren – who inspired him to process his cloths with irons to give them a patinated surface. In a work, Cranach’s naked Venus and Cupido meet a shoe ad for the brand Playboy in a strange, erotic charged dance between male and female symbols.
After his departure at the age of 53 in the end of the 1980s, Dick Bengtsson was almost forgotten, but in 2005, his artistry was great with yet another exhibition at the Moderna Museet and associated yearbook from SAK, Sweden’s general art associations. Since then he has had something of a cult status, especially among contemporary artists such as Ernst Billgren, Karin Mamma Andersson, Jockum Nordström and Jens Fänge.
When Sven-Harrys now, another 20 years later, opens its exhibition with several of Dick Bengtsson’s Keyworks, it gives another generation of artists and museum visitors the opportunity to experience this important artist for the first time.
And the first they Learn to bounce for before, of course, is his provocative use of hooks as a motive. They can show up a little anywhere, on the window of a barn, in the corner of a postcard -like motif of a church at sunset, in an interior from the Kumla prison.
Many critics and interpreters of Bengtsson’s work have put the boiler in deep folds in front of these motif clashes. What did Bengtsson really want to say? That Nazism is everywhere? That art history is stained by authoritarian expressions? Or did he just, like the punk in the late 1970s, want to provoke the establishment with the forbidden symbol?
In the aforementioned catalog from 2005, writer Douglas Feuk turns on the question, and concludes that Dick Bengtsson himself must have been wondering about the function of the chin cross in his own works. Even in the finely designed catalog published in conjunction with Sven-Harry’s exhibition, Ann-Sofi Noring states that « everyone’s attempts at interpretations are temporary and time-bound ».
But if one turns On the reasoning and asks what these paintings would be without the Svastikas so the picture may be slightly clear. A more or less faithful replica of Hopper’s street scene or a gray -black painting of a dilapidated Swedish wooden box is not that interesting in itself. Although by adding the foremost symbol of this evil, Bengtsson loads the paintings with an energy that shortens all attempts at a literal interpretation.
That is why his paintings continue to fascinate, which is why it would be directly devastating to try to censor or cancelle his work in some sense. On the other hand, as Sven-Harry’s contextualize and question the offensive title of a painting with two black people is highly reasonable.
In an extended ambition to put Dick Bengtsson in a contemporary context, the museum shows in parallel an exhibition with contemporary artists who in one way or another were inspired by or relate to his artistry.
Here they are already found The admirers Jens Fänge and Karin Mamma Andersson, but also slightly younger artists such as Salad Hilowle and Tobias Bradford. Putting older art in dialogue with the contemporary has been a common curatorial grip in recent years, with mixed results.
In this exhibition it works pretty well. Especially Hilowles black and white film about a black actor who was fought with the prejudice in the 1940s Swedish theater and film world, which in this context appears as a subtle comment on the above-mentioned Bengtsson painting of two black people.
The concept artist Leif Elggren’s use of the black -yellow tape that usually signals danger is congenial with Bengtsson’s significant symbolism.
Other feels as soon as possible Enter with shoe horns, such as Niki Lindroth von Bahr’s Stop Motion movie and Theresa Traore Dahlberg’s glass vases with metallic elements-although both works are completely excellent on their own.
But ultimately, it is Dick Bengtsson who is at the center. Given his status as an « artist’s artist », it is slightly incomprehensible that his work is shown so rarely, so it really has to take care of now when the opportunity is given.
Read more: Magically male painting at the Modern Museum
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