"Vykort" was created in 1985, during the final year of Dick Bengtsson’s life. The work was produced using the pictorial and technical method that he developed throughout his artistic career, in which existing images and motifs drawn from sources such as postcards, newspapers and books were reworked and transferred into painting. Bengtsson often used tracing and graph paper to transfer the contours of motifs, contributing to the angular and flattened forms characteristic of his paintings. Collage held a particular place in this process.

In an interview, Vera Spalensky, who represented Bengtsson as a gallerist from 1982 to 1989, recounted the story of a box of collages that survived the fire at Bengtsson’s home in Voxna in 1982. After the fire, he retrieved the surviving collages and continued working with them. According to Spalensky, a number of larger, reworked works emerged from this material, including Postcard. She also describes collage as a recurring element throughout Bengtsson’s artistic practice, noting that his paintings, too, could take on a collage-like quality, with different pictorial elements appearing to be assembled rather than constructed through traditional painting techniques.

The devastating fire in Voxna was a decisive event in Bengtsson’s life and artistic career. A large number of works were destroyed, while the surviving box of collages became one of the bodies of material to which he could return. Spalensky’s account thus reveals a tangible connection between Bengtsson’s early collage works and the larger paintings he produced during the 1980s.

Bengtsson’s working method was based on the deliberate use of pre-existing visual material. Although self-taught, he drew motifs from both everyday visual sources and art-historical models. The origins of these images often remained recognisable, even as they were transformed through cropping, juxtaposition and transfer into painting. In this way, different visual worlds came together within a single composition.

The surface of the painting is also an essential aspect of Bengtsson’s method. He treated the paint layer with an iron to give the surface an aged and worn appearance, and could subsequently apply varnish to create a hard, glossy finish. This procedure is often linked to his interest in the Dutch art forger Han van Meegeren and his methods of giving newly made paintings the appearance of age.

Bengtsson’s work thus embodies a deliberate tension between borrowed imagery and his own artistic interventions. Postcards, newspaper images and other source materials serve as starting points, but their original contexts are altered through their transfer into painting. In "Vykort" this method is combined with the treated surface and the restrained, simplified form. The result is an image in which traces of both the source material and the working process itself remain visible.

"Vykort" was subsequently included in three major presentations of Bengtsson’s art: at Lunds Konsthall in 1994, the Göteborgs Konstmuseum in 2001, and Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 2006. The work’s exhibition history places it firmly within the body of Bengtsson’s work that received attention in major museum exhibitions following his death.