Vera Frisén (1910-1990)

She was shy, Vera Frisén (1910-1990) and could have had a brilliant career, but she didn't want to. When she was persuaded to have a solo exhibition at Galleri Färg och Form in Stockholm in 1941, the success was a given and she was described as Sweden's Helene Schjerfbeck, but then she withdrew. Affected by TBC, external pressure and age, she was essentially forgotten at the time of her death and had lived without attention for her art for her last 50 years. The landscapes painting was dedicated to the summer months and the portraits during the winter in the studio. The landscapes and the portraits had a closely intertwined relationship. One could describe it as her portraying nature and creating human landscapes from her portraits. The essence of her painting was to try to capture the immaterial such as air, light and the human spirit. Vera Frisén's painting related to time and space in an almost conceptual way and in the landscape paintings as well as in the portraits we can see one and the same motif unfolding into a series of paintings where aging and transience are depicted with empathetic sharpness of expression. This fascinating strategy becomes particularly evident in the portraits. Portrait painting is a genre within painting, where the intention is to represent a specific person. But Frisén's portraits contain neither attributes nor symbols that tell us anything about the subject's own person, they are rather universal. A relaxed face, without emotional expression, which does not reveal the depicted person's social status, or historical context, and which does not highlight anything specific personal about the depicted person.