The 1960s and 70s: Pop and politics

Pop art, social criticism and art in the metro.

Öyvind Fahlström and Barbro Östlihn worked in New York, and Pop art found Swedish forms of expression. Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd played with words, lasers and symbols.

In the 1970s art became political. Peter Tillberg’s Will You Be Profitable, Little Friend? became a symbol of the critique of school and society, and Siri Derkert had already carved the struggle for peace and women’s rights into the concrete of the metro.

The Stockholm metro became “the world’s longest art exhibition”, with works in more than ninety stations. Artists such as Lena Cronqvist and Marie-Louise Ekman took up women’s experiences in their painting.