Evert Lundquist

The painter of matter and light.

Evert Lundquist painted simple subjects – a bearer, a tree, a window – in thick, heavy paint. He was a professor at the Royal Institute of Art.

Evert Lundquist was born in Stockholm in 1904. He studied at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm and also spent time in Paris. For a long time he worked largely in obscurity, and his breakthrough came only in the 1940s, when he was approaching forty.

His art is easy to recognise. He painted simple, everyday subjects, such as a person carrying something, a tree, a lamp, a window, a face or a group of bathers. He applied the paint in very thick layers, often with a palette knife, so that the picture almost becomes a relief. The forms are coarse and simplified, and the light seems to break through the heavy mass of paint. He wanted to capture the existence of things and people rather than details.

Lundquist did not belong to any group but has been seen as a Swedish counterpart to the existential figuration of post-war Europe.

In the 1960s he was a professor at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm and influenced many young painters. For many years he lived and worked at Drottningholm outside Stockholm, where his studio is now open as a museum. He died in 1994. He is regarded as one of the great Swedish painters of the post-war period.

• The post-war era
• The post-war era and Concretism