Bukowskis presents Ola Billgren at this spring’s Contemporary Art & Design

If I were to apply this reasoning to Swedish conditions, it is Ola Billgren who comes closest to Richter's position. Some people probably think it is dangerous to make a comparison between them, as there are some who consider Billgren a Richter epigone, but then they have not done their homework. Certainly there are similarities, but much of these similarities are a parallel activity that can be explained by the similarities of the zeitgeist. It is typical of our Swedish mentality that our "heroes" must have role models in the wider world.

Billgren has the same impressive painterly range in his production as Richter, which has meant that, like Richter, he has been considered a 'difficult' painter. But there is much evidence to suggest that today he has achieved a position similar to Richter's, even if this does not mean that he is becoming an instant celebrity. But the appreciation of him has probably never been as great as it is today.

Like Richter, Billgren has a long relationship with painting that goes back to the late 1950s. His breakthrough, like Richter's, came in the early sixties when the media's expansion of the world into a global village radically changed the perception of reality. But neither Billgren nor Richter got stuck in the virtuoso neo-realist painting. The Billgrens looked further into the history of painting with a problematization of painting that questioned rather than confirmed. During the seventies, Billgren devoted much energy to investigating the basic structures of classical painting, both in terms of motif and painting. He devoted considerable energy to studies of painters as diverse as Hammershöi, Hopper, Titian and Bonnard. But the result was never pure references, but always merged into syntheses in Billgren's own spirit.

During the 1980s, Billgren came to concentrate his interest on Romanticism and its emotional hub. However, it was always a Romanticism in quotation marks that examined and deconstructed Romanticism's approach rather than its emotional timbre. A central motif was the landscape, but hardly the purely Romantic landscape. Billgren's landscapes were composed of photographic collage elements that complicated the experiential aspect of the landscape. In the form of large panoramic paintings, it was not primarily the natural landscape, but the urban landscape that was subjected to his dissecting scrutiny.