'sk askunge lämnar hus'
Signed Helene Billgren and dated 08 verso. Acrylic on mdf 61 x 61 cm.
Angelika Knäpper Gallery, Stockholm.
The painting "sk askunge lämnar hus" was exhibited at what would become Helene Billgren's breakthrough exhibition at Angelika Knäpper Gallery in Stockholm in the spring of 2009.
She describes her paintings in her book "Den andra vägen" (The Other Way), 2011:
"I don't like to paint faces, eye eye nose mouth. It's almost impossible for me to capture both sadness and joy in an expression. Instead, I try to create that through other means, like having the hair flying or not. Additionally, I like to distort the body slightly. For example, I often remove the arms, but removing an eye hasn't worked so far, unless I cover it with bangs or something more natural like that. It's not good if the colour looks too normal. That's an opinion I have in everyday life as well. My favorite figure is someone between Snow White and a señorita, both with black hair. It's an image from my memory archive."
Helene Billgren is a Swedish visual artist. She studied at Valand Academy of Fine Arts from 1982 up until 1987. The female form, the home, and family stand at the forefront of Helene’s artistic career. She is highly interested in the mundaneness of the everyday, transforming it in her art in her own way. Old items and clothing are repurposed to create something new, occupying a new purpose in her artistic universe.
In recent years, Billgren has become interested in collecting patters, decorative objects, and symbols which we surround ourselves with during the Christmas season. She alters, embroiders, writes, draws and puts together these elements in a bizarre and unusual way, transforming their function, and in turn their appearance and meanings.