Bengt Nordquist was a visual artist, graphic artist and musician. Born in 1917 in Borås, he died in 2012. He studied under John Hedaeus in Borås from 1932 to 1935, at Börge Hovedskou’s School of Painting in Gothenburg from 1946 to 1947, at Valand’s School of Painting in Gothenburg from 1947 to 1948, and at the Académie de la Grande Chaumiêre in Paris from 1947 to 1948.

Nordquist participated in numerous group exhibitions, including at Liljevalchs in Stockholm, Konsthallen in Gothenburg and the Borås Art Museum, as well as in several other Swedish cities. He held a solo exhibition at Bror Mann’s Konstgalleriet in 1954 and made his breakthrough in Stockholm that same year, together with the then 93-year-old textile artist Anna Casparsson. They performed music together, Anna at the piano, which she had played for at least 80 years, in a radio programme by Karl-Axel Arfvidsson. The programme was introduced in advance in Röster i Radio by Ilmar Laaban, who described the artist’s images as fusing architecture and decay, and as beginning to form knots, loops and garlands in freely floating, skating-trail colouraturas, blue and white against a night-dark background. The icy has definitively been transformed into music.

In 1954, together with fellow artists, he founded Konstnärsgården in Strömstad. In 1956, together with Inge Schiöler, he built a summer studio, Havsöga, on Öddö outside Strömstad. His first stay in Rome and at San Michele on Capri, Italy, took place in 1956–1957, and in 1959 he moved to Södertälje. From 1965 to 1966, he worked at the Grafiska Sällskapet’s studio in Stockholm, together with, among others, Kerstin Abram-Nilsson. From 1970 to 1971, he was an art critic for Svenska nyhetsbyrån in Stockholm, and in 1984 he moved to Gothenburg. (Lexikonettamanda.se)