LARS LERIN. Watercolor, signed.

Number eight from "Deception island, Antarctica." Signed in pencil in the upper right corner.
Purchased at the opening at Öckerö Library, 1996.
Motif of outpost in Antarctica with text in pencil on the right y-axis.
Image dimensions 74 x 105 cm.

He depicts nature, clear-cuts and mountains, the depopulated countryside with its deserted gas stations, million-dollar program blocks, rooms filled with books. Desolate landscapes, properties and libraries that we viewers are faced with. Watercolor paper filled with sadness and an often silent melancholy. But he also captures the sky and the birds in flight or those who sat down for a moment, and the sun, stuck on some facade on its way down on a late summer day. Lars Lerin himself is more difficult to catch. He is first and foremost an artist, but also a writer, popular cultural personality, TV presenter and honorary doctorate. Multiple awards including the August prize and royal Litteris et Artibus.

Lars Lerin grew up in the working town of Munkfors in Värmland, but was educated at Gerleborgsskolan in Bohuslän and then at Valand Academy of Arts. For several years he was active in Lofoten but moved back to Värmland in 2000. Five years later, a permanent Lars Lerin exhibition was inaugurated in Munkfors. This was moved to Sandgrund in Karlstad, where a new museum, Sandgrund Lars Lerin, opened its doors in 2012. He has also exhibited at a wide range of museums and galleries over the years. The exhibition "Archives" showed a 24 meter long painting depicting lined up bookshelves where books were crowded with more institutional archive boxes and binders.

At Stockholms Auktionsverk Göteborg we now meet two of Lars Lerin's watercolors created during the 1990s. They can today be considered relatively early, even though he already had a remarkable amount of solo exhibitions behind him at that time. In the imposing work "Deception island, Antarctica" we see both the big sky, sleight of hand and at the same time with perfection reproduced by the artist. The white cloud shocks slide over the isolated environment where an old flying machine stands and rusts away.