cronqvist
We are pleased to be able to present around twenty artworks by Lena Cronqvist - etchings and drypoint prints from the 1980s, 90s and 2000s. The works come from Cronqvist's own archive and we have access to one copy of each image.
It is, as Sebastian Johans wrote in Dagens Nyheter in a presentation of Lena Cronqvist's major exhibition at the Royal Academy in Stockholm in March this year, completely impossible to exclude Lena Cronqvist's work from our contemporary art history. She is canonized on good grounds, he believes. Maybe because she:
“so consistently tackles and explores the often large themes that she takes on. Social and human vulnerability. Loss and pain. The fine, sometimes non-existent line between parenthood and madness”
The exhibition at the Royal Academy was a retrospective that presented works from Cronqvist's 60-year long career, including a selection of prints. Cronqvist has worked with printmaking in parallel throughout her long creative life. Drypoint printing and etching are two techniques she often returns to, and they are also the two printing techniques that are represented among the works we have received. The collaboration with the printer Siv Johansson is widely written of and a special exhibitionwas dedicated to it at Grafikens hus in 2011.
In the prints, we recognize many of the motifs that Cronqvist has explored and reworked repeatedly. The girl with the fishbowl is one, where the girl looks onto the trapped fish, or does she even meet it in a kiss?
The depictions of insects are less well-known Cronqvist motifs, but well worth a closer look. They are small in format, virtuoso executed and the blackness of the print in contrast to the white core of the paper creates a fantastic luster in the image.
Lena Cronqvist was born in 1938 in Karlstad. She studied at the Royal Academy of Arts in the early 1960s and had her big breakthrough in the 70s. Since then, she has had a large number of solo exhibitions, including at Waldemarsudde in 2020, Liljevalchs in 2013 and an exhibition in dialogue with Edvard Munch at the Munch Museum in Oslo in 2018.
About the prints
Drypoint and etchings in small editions of between 22 and 40 per image
Hand-printed by Siv Johansson
Signed and numbered by Lena Cronqvist
Please note that – as for all our artworks – we have these works in commission from Lena Cronqvist. This means that when you buy a piece, you support the artist herself and her work.
