LENNART RODHE. Composition. Color serigraphy. Signed and dated 1997. 123/200.

100 x 70 cm.

Lennart Rodhe was born in 1916 in Stockholm. He studied at Edward Berggren's painting school and the Stockholm Academy of the Arts with Sven X Erixon as a teacher. He also made several study trips to Norway, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. While in Paris, Rodhe took the impression of concretism and in the 1940s he became one of the leading forces in Sweden for the direction and he is one of the foremost of the Swedish artists who became dominant after the Second World War. In 1947, Lennart Rodhe participated in the exhibition "Young Art" at the Gallery Färg och Form in Stockholm. The critics saw in the exhibition a new rather common design language among this generation of Swedish artists and despite the fact that many of the participating artists defended themselves against a unifying designation, the latter came to be called "1947 men". The same generation of artists was reluctantly called "concretists". What united them was an aspiration away from previous generations' naturalistic depiction of man and nature. It was claimed that the purely concrete colors and shapes were a reality in themselves.