OLA BILLGREN. Watercolor, signed and dated -73.

The picture represents the artist's mother, Grete Billgren.
Purchased at Galerie Belle, Västerås. 26x29.5 cm.

OLA BILLGREN Ola Billgren was born on 5 January 1940 in Copenhagen and died on 4 November 2001 in Malmö.

He grew up in South Scania Löderup and received his artistic education at home from his parents Hans Billgren and Grete Billgren who were also artists. Ola Billgren was active in graphics, watercolour, collage, photography, film and set design, but he was most significant as a painter. He was also a culture writer and author.

At the age of 13, he began exhibiting watercolors and ink drawings locally around Löderup in Österlen, where the family had moved in 1940. Billgren lived in Lund from 1960 and in Malmö from 1973. Having previously painted abstracts, Billgren began early in 1963 to work with a photorealistic visual language. With this painting, he had his breakthrough with an exhibition at Galleri Karlsson in Stockholm in 1966. During the 1960s, Billgren was strongly influenced by the new French novel, mainly Alain Robbe-Grillet, and new wave cinema. The motifs were often interiors from modern apartments.

Around 1970, people came to occupy a more central place in a series of portraits. In the works at auction, we see the artist's mother Grete Billgren, realistically depicted behind an almost abstract background.

During the 1970s, Billgren's painting developed towards a more painterly expression. In the early 1980s, the work with the collage came to lead the work in a romantic direction, including in the lithography suite 19 romantic landscapes.

During the early 1980s, Billgren also worked with an abstract painting and during the end of the decade with urban landscapes in an impressionistic style. Billgren's painting from the 1990s is characterized by a saturated red color that is spread over the underlying motif.

Billgren was one of Sweden's most noted artists and his works broke auction records for living Swedish artists.

A large retrospective exhibition was shown at the Rooseum in Malmö and at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 1991. Ola Billgren is represented in a number of Swedish art museums such as Länsmuseet Gävleborg, Gothenburg Art Museum, Malmö Art Museum, Norrköping Art Museum and Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Kalmar Art Museum as well as foreign museums such as Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark and Musée National d'art Moderne Center Georges Pompidou in Paris.

He died in 2001 after a few months of illness.