Lars Englund

Lars Englund is one of the most significant and influential Swedish artists of our time. With a unique style that partly touches on minimalism and constructivism, he has worked with a range of themes during his sixty-year career – volumes, supporting structures, reliefs, pars pro toto, spheres, entanglements, borderlines, relatives, stables and instables. Using a wide range of techniques, often employing materials sourced from industry – plastic, rubber, carbon fibre, concrete, steel – Englund creates structures that occupy the borderland between sculpture and architecture. His work encompasses geometric abstractions and organic forms.

In his sculptures ‘Pars pro toto’, Latin for ‘the part for the whole’, Lars Englund uses mass-produced building components to create spatial constructions. The identical parts are joined together one by one with endless combination possibilities, linked together into unique forms that evoke associations with the structure of molecules and atoms in nature and the universe. These sculptures explore the relationship between surface and depth, stillness and movement. The components cease to be parts and merge together, where the repetition of the detail's form is subject to countless variations.

Over the years, Lars Englund has been exhibited at numerous museums and galleries, both in Sweden and internationally. He has had acclaimed exhibitions in Venice, Paris, New York and Warsaw, and in Sweden, an extensive retrospective exhibition was held at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 2005.