CARL JOHAN DE GEER. Composition, from the series “Asplund”.

Signed and dated Carl Johan De Geer 1999 on verso. Oil on panel, 141,5 x 98,5 cm (including frame).

FOCUS - Carl Johan De Geer

Uppsala Auktionskammare presents one of the most wayward and multidimensional works of Swedish post-war art: Carl Johan De Geer (b. 1938) - artist, photographer, designer, filmmaker, textile pioneer and writer. Few Swedish artists have broken down the boundaries between art, politics and everyday life with the same force and consistency. De Geer's work moves freely between painting and lithography, textile and photography, film and literature - always with the same curiosity, playfulness and critical acuity.

Raised in an aristocratic family, with roots in one of Sweden's most famous noble families, he turned his back on his background early on. His studies at Konstfack 1959—1962 marked the beginning of a lifelong questioning of taste, class and power, and as the 1960s moved towards its most turbulent stage, De Geer was at the centre of the radical cultural revolution that shaped an entirely new Swedish public image.

His breakthrough came with the now iconic work The Blasphemous Flag (1967), in which art and politics met in an image that challenged both nation, art concept and norm. The work was seized by police and burned, but soon became a symbol of artistic freedom and civil disobedience. The same uncompromising tone characterizes his participation in the satirical magazine Puss (1968—1973), where social criticism and anarchist humor were united in collage, drawings and photography. In the television series Tårtan (1972—73) which De Geer created together with Håkan Alexandersson, the same spirit was carried through television into the country's living rooms in an absurd and poetic revolt against convention.

But De Geer's artistry is as much a declaration of love for everyday life as a showdown with it. As co-founder of the 10-gruppen (1970), he changed Swedish design fundamentally. His textile designs - large-scale, colourful and with an obvious blend of playfulness, line and precision - moved art from the galleries to the homes, schools and public spaces. Few have succeeded like De Geer in making pattern a language in itself, where form, colour and politics meet in the most mundane of materials. This themed auction also features furniture upholstered in De Geer's textiles - a reminder of how integral his artistic universe is.

The photograph forms a parallel and deeply personal trail in De Geer's artistry. In the series Masks (1966, published 2010), he and his circle stage play, identity and disguise in their own living room in Bromma - a kind of visual essay on the free cultural climate of the 1960s. The series captures something deeply Swedish in the break between the private and the political, the ironic and the heartfelt, the finely cultural and the parodic. In the same way, the book and documentary film Med kamera som solace (1980) and Med Kamera som solace (1980) became Med Kamera som solace. Part 2 (2004) a self-portrait in the shadow of time: images that intersect a class journey in both directions, everyday life, play, rebellion and vulnerability, with a look that alternates between tenderness and mercilessness.

In painting and graphics, these themes reappear in new forms and De Geer's pictorial world moves between the directly agitatory and the lyrically poetic. In graphic works such as Desecrated the Flag and Guilty of What? there is the direct clout of the political poster, while paintings such as Asplund's work, Asplund's Turkish Meditation and The Perfect Room reflect his interest in architecture, spatiality and structure in a more meditative exploration of the possibilities of form and scale. The series Asplund, named after the architect Gunnar Asplund, shows how De Geer, in his late painting, combines constructive composition with personal symbolism.

De Geer's significance extends far beyond a single art form and he has come to embody the free and playful spirit of the whole Swedish avant-garde. In 2017, Carl Johan De Geer was awarded the government's Illis quorum medal “for outstanding artistry that renewed and enriched Swedish cultural life.”
Uppsala Auktionskammare's theme auction reflects the full breadth of Carl Johan De Geer's artistry: paintings, lithographs, photographs, furniture and textiles, from everyday life to politics, from black and white to color explosion. A collection that shows not only De Geer's artistic diversity, but also his irrepressible belief in the freedom of art, and in the right of the playing human being to never stop questioning his time.