Bo Swenson - An Artistry

Bo Swenson (1932–2022) was one of Sweden’s leading modernist painters and printmakers. His consistent visual language was characterized by vibrant and dynamic abstract compositions, rooted in his own memories and observations. Stockholms Auktionsverk now has the pleasure of presenting a collection of works from Swenson’s colour-rich artistic oeuvre.
In his youth, journeys by train and moped through post-war Europe left him with lasting visual impressions. Experiences of foliage and the shifting colours of nature merged with the speed and movement of travel during a period of rapid change. His painting has been described as modernist nature romanticism, conveying a sense of motifs in flux—as if captured in motion, in passing.
Swenson studied at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm from 1958 to 1963. The same year he graduated, he made his debut at Galerie Blanche in Stockholm. Early on, around 1960, he gained access to a studio in Hagaparken, which would become fundamental to his artistic practice. Working in the orangery studio for most of his life, he repeatedly returned to interpretations of the surrounding park. The building housed several studios occupied by contemporaries such as Eva Lange, Laris Strunke, and Berto Marklund.
In the upstairs studio of the Orangeriet, light poured in through large windows on both long sides. The boundary between indoors and outdoors seemed to dissolve, with walls lined with works depicting the park below. Nature was ever-present—outside the windows as well as within the art itself.
As a child, long before an artistic career was more than a distant dream, Swenson often wandered through the park with his parents. These childhood memories undeniably shaped his later work, in which he explored fleeting images from the past—whether a distant then or a transient present. His method was to immerse himself fully in a place, absorbing all its sensory impressions. Back in the studio, he would recreate the inner image as a new one—first reconstructed within himself, and later on the canvas.
The works in this auction consist primarily of paintings from the 2000s, a period marked by constant creation and reworking. He painted over the same canvases repeatedly, engaging in an ongoing process of revisiting and reshaping his memories of the surrounding nature. Among the lots is also a large textile piece, woven by Handarbetets Vänner, as well as enamels produced at Gustavsberg—created through a process personally overseen by Swenson to ensure the highest quality. His works are often large in scale and teem with movement and transformation. Throughout his life, he continued to remember, to create, and to recreate.

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