Helene Billgren
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"Fröken regnbåge"
Signed Helene Billgren and dated -09 verso. Acrylic on panel 110 x 100 cm.
Provenance
Angelika Knäpper Gallery, Stockholm.
Tom Böttiger Collection, Stockholm.
Exhibitions
Liljevalchs konsthall, Stockholm, "Helene Billgren - Mina 100 favoriter", 11 October - 8 Decemeber, 2019, cat. no. 25
Literature
Helene Billgren (ed), Angelika Knäpper Gallery, "Helene Billgren, Flickor hemifrån & mina drömmar", Stockholm, 2011, illustrated full page.
SAK, "Helene Billgren - The End", Stockholm, 2012, illustrated full page p. 27
More information
Early on, she found her own style. A cool girl/woman from the 60s with teased hair, jeans or a skirt is a motif that Helene Billgren has returned to. Distinctively drawn with charcoal and involved in slightly humorously twisted situations. The girl also reappears in her paintings, now she is small and more diffuse in contours, often seen from behind, standing amazed in an overwhelming colorful landscape. Often at the lower edge of the painting, as if she were standing on the threshold of adventure. Sometimes she appears in the middle of the landscape with color up to her knees. It happens that she accompanies other horse girls. Similarities can be seen with the turned away figures in both Caspar David Friedrich's romantic 19th-century painting and Dick Bengtsson's enigmatic images.
"The girls have been very important to me since childhood. My sister and I played a lot with paper dolls. We searched in magazines and we drew girls, mannequins, and clothes."
In Helene Billgren's artistry, the representational and concrete are combined with the abstract and obscure, giving the works different layers where recognition is interspersed with the mysterious and unknown.
In connection with the large retrospective exhibition at Liljevalchs in 2019, the then director Mårten Carstenfors wrote:
"- With her way of handling color, Helene Billgren shows that she is one of the foremost painters in Sweden today: so fresh, so beautiful, so bold, so fate-laden, yet always relaxed and visually intoxicating."
Helene Billgren was born in 1952 in Norrköping and educated at the Valand Academy of Fine Arts in Gothenburg from 1982-1987. She had her first solo exhibition at Gallery Rotor in Gothenburg in 1985 and gained recognition in 1989 with three exhibitions in Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmö. Helene Billgren has exhibited at museums and galleries throughout Sweden and has created public decorations at Karlstad University. She has also designed sets and costumes for theater and opera, including the performing arts at Folkets Hus in Hammarkullen.