Ola Billgren
From photorealism to Romanticism.
Ola Billgren moved from photorealist interiors in the 1960s to Romantic landscapes and abstraction. He was also an incisive writer on art.
Ola Billgren was born in 1940 in Gothenburg and in the 1960s became one of the artists who renewed Swedish painting. He made his debut early, and by the middle of the decade he was attracting attention with paintings based on photographs.
His photorealist pictures from the second half of the 1960s often show empty or nearly empty rooms: modern interiors, windows, furniture and people who seem frozen in the moment. The pictures are cool and precise, but there is also something uncanny about them. Billgren was interested in how photography affects the way we see, and how painting can imitate the mechanical image while also questioning it. He is counted among the first in Sweden to work in this way.
In the 1970s and 80s he changed direction. He drew closer to Romanticism and 19th-century landscape painting and painted misty, luminous landscapes and later more abstract pictures with loose brushwork. For many the change came as a surprise, but for Billgren there was a continuity: the question of what a picture is and how it relates to reality remained.
Billgren was also an important writer and theorist. He wrote essays on the conditions of painting and taught aspiring artists. He died in 2001. Today he is seen as one of the most intellectual Swedish painters of the post-war period, and his early interiors are among the best-known images in Swedish art of the 1960s.