Lena Cronqvist

In the 1990s, Lena Cronqvist began to seriously explore sculpture as a form of expression, and in the last decade she has increasingly emerged as one of the most intriguing sculptors in the world today. The early sculptures, some of which were created during visits to New York with husband and author Göran Tunström, were small in size. In the opening remarks toLena Cronqvist’s exhibition catalogue for the exhibition at Konsthallen Lokstallet in Strömstad in 2000. Göran Tunström described the first “Girls” this way:

“I remember them backlit, in our first, cramped apartment in New York, those little wax clumps. How they were transformed - as if she could see through her fingers - into creatures with an appearance, character, little ugly-pretty figures in the beginning stages of life, with the whole registry of possible actions in their genes. And they were smiling. They smile, they stick out their tongue, they place their hands precociously on their hips and do not behave appropriately at all. They giggle at themselves and at us. And surely they have Names, though they currently do not disclose them, because a Name would lock them out of the utopian country where every action - even the most cruel ones - is allowed, every grimace a challenge, both to the world and to the SELF that they (we) have been domesticated to bear, very soon when it has abruptly ended, the era of the Girl. Of the child.”

Mårten Castenfors and Louise Fogelström describe, in the Liljevalchs’ exhibition catalogue “Lena Cronqvist”, 2014, how the artist works in parallel with painting and sculpture while in New York. “Picked out of their paintings, the girls are alive in tubs and in water. The sculptures are teasingly distinctive, and their wit calls to mind the sculptures Matisse once made – he too a wonderful painter who, through clay, went one step further as an artist. "