Lena Cronqvist

Painter of the body and the family.

Lena Cronqvist paints childhood, motherhood and hospitals in a style at once naive and unsparing. She is regarded as one of Sweden’s foremost contemporary painters.

Lena Cronqvist was born in 1938. She studied at Konstfack and the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm in the late 1950s and early 1960s. She was married to the writer Göran Tunström, and the couple lived for many years in Gothenburg.

From the early 1970s her art became deeply personal. She painted pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood in a way that was unusually frank and free of idyll. She also painted pictures from psychiatric care, based on her own experiences, with white hospital rooms, beds and solitary figures. Later she depicted her parents’ old age, illness and death.

From the 1990s her art was dominated by girls, often in pairs, with dolls, toys and animals. They look innocent but are often cruel to each other, and the pictures hold jealousy, rivalry and loneliness. She has also made bronze sculptures of the same girl figures. Her style combines simple, almost naive drawing with a cool, unsparing gaze, and the colours are often light but charged.

Cronqvist is regarded as one of the foremost Swedish painters of the past fifty years. Her depictions of women’s lives, bodies and minds have been of great importance for later artists, and her work is held by Moderna Museet and the Gothenburg Museum of Art, among others.

• Contemporary art
• The 1960s and 70s: Pop and politics