Works by Nygårds Karin Bengtsson from the Tom Böttiger Collection

Nygårds Karin Bengtsson

Nygårds Karin Bengtsson's photographs depict a staged reality. The images are carefully arranged and structured like a still life, taking into account light, color, and form. Through her staged photographs, she aims to show how life gradually transforms from a narrative into a memory.

Nygårds Karin Bengtsson's work encompasses nearly all aspects of film production: script, direction, set design, casting, costume, lighting, and props. The result is painterly images that are always timelessly minimalist, revolving around questions of human relationships with time and space, fiction and reality, memory and perception. They become frozen moments, obscure and mysterious, in a state before or after the drama. In an interview, she stated that Time and Death are her constant themes of work, and the transience of life is something she has always contemplated deeply. In the winter of 2021/2022, the Zorn Museum in Mora showed the exhibition "Med ryggen mot tiden", Nygårds Karin Bengtsson's largest solo exhibition, which included works from 2004 onwards. In connection with this, Nygårds Karin Bengtsson was interviewed in Helsingborgs Dagblad (17 October 2021):

"Would you say that you take a stance against his [Anders Zorn] national romanticism?

– Rather, I resist how people are portrayed in art, mainly depending on whether you are a man or a woman. I view all my models as equals, whether men, women, or children. In Zorn's time, children were romanticized, but something I have done is to see children as existential beings who do not shy away from the difficult."