Certain paintings can be described in purely musical terms. At times, a shadow or the hint of a motif can be glimpsed in Mona Lodström’s works: a horizontal blue line, for example, may evoke the sea. Otherwise, her experiences of nature seem to have been transformed into cosmically elemental visions of pure colour on her canvases. Mona Lodström was primarily active as a painter, but also worked with textiles. Among other institutions, she studied at Otte Sköld’s painting school from 1937 to 1939 and at the Académie Ranson in Paris in 1953. Lodström exhibited frequently both in Sweden and abroad, including at De ungas salong in Stockholm in 1942, and at Lilla Paviljongen and Lorensbergs konstsalong in Gothenburg in 1955. She also participated in the exhibition 9e Réalités Nouvelles in Paris in 1954, alongside Swedish artists such as Olle Baertling, Eric Chambert, Inger Ekdahl and Joy Egnel, as well as international names including Jean Gorin, Auguste Herbin, Georges Papazoff and Victor Vasarely, among others.

Parallels can be drawn between Lodström’s paintings and the work of Hans Hartung, Serge Poliakoff and Pierre Soulages. Her world is romantic, with small rays of colour playing across imaginary cliff faces within cave-like spatial formations of evocative charm. Harry Källström wrote the following in a review of Lodström’s painting:

“There is nothing ingratiating about her abstract paintings, executed in heavy yet well-tuned colours. What do the paintings mean? No one knows, since they are nameless. But if one stands before them for a while, one feels that the melodies of life are sounding within them. At the same time as they speak, on a purely psychological level, of broken bars, shattered chains and fragments of oppressive structures in the mind, the light is dissolving the solid element and allowing the melody of life to sound once more. A painting without a name can say more than one camouflaged by a carefully considered title.” (Harry Källmark, review of the exhibition at Lilla Paviljongen in Dagen, 17 February 1955.)