Helene Billgren
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"Klänning i skogen"
Signed. Diptych. Plush on plywood. Tree, height 30 cm. Dress, height 82 cm.
Provenance
Tom Böttiger Collection, Stockholm.
Exhibitions
Borås Konstmuseum, Kulturhuset, "Helene Billgren", 11 March - 8 May 1990.
More information
Early on, she found her own style. A cool girl/woman from the 60s with teased hair, jeans or a skirt is a motif that Helene Billgren has returned to. Distinctively drawn with charcoal and involved in slightly humorously twisted situations. The girl also reappears later in the paintings, now she is small and more diffuse in contours, often seen from behind, standing amazed in an overwhelming colorful landscape. Often at the bottom edge of the painting, as if she stood on the threshold of adventure. Sometimes she appears in the middle of the landscape with color up to her knees. She sometimes accompanies other horse girls. Similarities can be seen with the turned-away figures in both Caspar David Friedrich's romantic 19th-century painting and Dick Bengtsson's enigmatic images.
"The girls have been really important to me since childhood. My sister and I played a lot with paper dolls. We searched in magazines and we drew girls, mannequins, and clothes."
In Helene Billgren's artistry, the representational and concrete are combined with the abstract and obscure, creating different layers in the works where recognition is mixed with the mysterious and unknown.
In connection with the major retrospective exhibition at Liljevalchs in 2019, the then director Mårten Castenfors wrote:
"With her way of handling color, Helene Billgren shows that she is one of the foremost painters in Sweden today: so fresh, so beautiful, so bold, so fateful, yet always relaxed and visually intoxicating."
Helene Billgren was born in 1952 in Norrköping and educated at the Valand Academy of Fine Arts in Gothenburg from 1982 to 1987. She had her first solo exhibition at Galleri Rotor in Gothenburg in 1985 and broke through in 1989 with three exhibitions in Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmö. Helene Billgren has exhibited at museums and galleries throughout Sweden and has created public decorations at Karlstad University as well as had a major solo exhibition at Färgfabriken and Liljevalchs in Stockholm. She has also designed sets and costumes for theater and opera, such as the curtain activities at Folkets Hus in Hammarkullen.
Artist
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.