James Rosenquist’s painting “Little Welcome to the Waterplanet II” is part of his extensive project “Welcome to the Water Planet”, a prominent series of large-scale prints, collages and paintings that he created between 1987 and 1989. The imagery balances realism with kaleidoscopic abstraction, a combination characteristic of Rosenquist’s artistic style as a whole.

In “Stilleben” from 1967, Ola Billgren turns his gaze towards an everyday interior. On a red-and-white striped tablecloth sit a bowl, a loaf of bread and a small blue box. In the background, a dark piano is just visible, while a lamp partially enters the composition from the upper right-hand corner. It is an apparently unassuming scene, yet in Billgren’s work a curious shift takes place: the familiar simultaneously becomes strange and elusive.