Dick Bengtsson

The suite “Oktoberceremonin I-IV” was part of Dick Bengtsson’s first solo exhibition held at Galleri Observatorium in Stockholm in 1963.

The exhibition comprised eight paintings in total and “Oktoberceremonin IV” has been owned by the same family since it was purchased on 14 November 1963. Two sheets of paper, the gallery’s description and list of the artist’s works, are glued to the back of the painting. Regarding The suite “Oktoberceremonien I-IV”, these state: “It exemplifies a transition from a distinct and almost pedantically drawn figurative style in a small format to a looser style on a larger scale in which the subject has sunk into the background and been rendered abstract as barely distinguishable shapes, where the external form attracts attention due to the ostentatiously beautiful execution. There is no aggression or social pathos in this painting, merely a kind of meditative atmosphere in a still and anonymous world in which the figures stand in a mysterious sense of community with each other. This is a subjective painting, far removed from the ‘eternal truth of absolutism’.”

Dick Bengtsson’s debut exhibition at Galleri Observatorium attracted a great deal of attention in Sweden’s two major national papers, Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet, and the Stockholm paper Stockholms-Tidningen. Svenska Dagbladet journalist Stig Johansson’s review bears the title “A self-willed
debutant” and continues: “In ‘Oktoberceremonin’, a suite of four extremely refined paintings, the joy of painting, the desire to play with the colour materials to produce a beautiful surface led him away from the clear to the vague and unclear. But this is a lack of clarity that has meaning. The unclear becomes ambiguous and poetically expressive. The faces, bodies, objects, everything is enveloped in skies of beautiful colour, transformed but never hidden, only glimpsed in suggestive light from rents in the mass of colour and specks of blue sky shining through the ragged clouds.”

When faced with a work by Dick Bengtsson, one is never truly certain of the meaning of the different components. His art is filled with mystery and asks more questions than it answers. In his multifaceted world, the observer is forced to challenge their values and paths of association, it demands their full attention. It is difficult to distinguish between truth and imagination and he himself has described his paintings as a form of falsification of reality.

His artist colleagues admired Bengtsson’s painting and a circle of collectors and museum curators recognised his greatness during his short life, in which he was said to be an “artist’s artist”. Constantly today we see clear traces of Dick Bengtsson’s influence in Swedish contemporary art.