Torsten Andersson was one of Sweden's most legendary artists, celebrated by critics and peers, an inspiration to many, but also enigmatic and known for destroying most of what he created. His paintings can sometimes be perceived as careless, but for each painting he often made hundreds of sketches and studies. Then he burned everything that did not meet his standards. His self-criticism led him to “cancel” paintings that had been finished for many years and had been exhibited in several museums and art halls. Lars Nittve, as director of the Moderna Museet, wrote the following: “Of a hundred working drawings, ninety are destroyed. The surviving ten drawings provide impulses for a hundred new ones, of which ninety are destroyed. Twenty drawings remain. Of these, sixteen are destroyed. Four remain. They proceed in the working process, become paintings, with no guarantee of survival.”
Torsten Andersson studied in 1945 at Otte Sköld's painting school, at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 1947, and from 1946 to 1950 at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, where he was appointed a remarkably young professor in 1960. He was awarded the Carnegie Art Award twice: first prize of one million kronor in 2008 and third prize in 1998. He also received the 1997 Schock Prize in art.
In his early paintings, he depicted portraits of abstract objects where nature had served as a model, thereby rediscovering the possibilities of painting after modernism, in a new era. Slowly but surely, he began to carve out his very own language and liberated himself from predecessors and the prevailing tradition. After many years of silence, he presented a series of paintings of abstract sculptures with poetic origins in the 1980s. Gradually, the motifs became concrete sculptures, and his canvases filled with soft textile forms and signs in the early 2000s. The language evolved and solidified.
In the 1990s, he donated around twenty large paintings to the Malmö Art Museum, which has the foremost collection of Torsten Andersson's art. He is also represented in several important private collections, as well as at the Moderna Museet and the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm and the Helsingborg Museum.