Karin Broos

In "The Red Sofa 2" an anonymous woman is placed in a cozy home environment. She is curled up in the bourgeois Carl Malmsten sofa "Hemmakväll," with a traditional bookshelf wall filled with reference books in the background. It's a bit messy, but we still feel that there is work happening in this room. The setting could be from the 1950s if it weren't for the fairly large printer taking up space in one corner and an open laptop testifying to the 2000s. The main character is completely absorbed in her own world, with her gaze turned towards what is happening on the screen. Like the Dutch 17th-century painters Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch's paintings of women reading letters, it sparks the viewer's inner imagination.

Karin Broos studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in the city of 's-Hertogenbosch in the Netherlands between 1970 and 1975. The artist has described how she had been a searching soul and how she felt that she had found her place in the strict discipline that prevailed at the art school. The days were filled with figure drawing and model painting according to old traditions, and at the end of each academic year, there was an evaluation and selection of students. It was a constant pursuit of perfection. After graduation, there was a strong longing for the Swedish nature and a simpler life. Together with her husband Marc, they found a house in Värmland where they settled down. For a while after her education, Broos painted excessively rough to create distance from perfection. Later in life, Karin Broos transitioned to abstract painting and then to photorealistic art.

It wasn't until 2007 that Broos had her national breakthrough in Sweden. She has said that she is grateful that it took so long, as her family and work developed hand in hand. The models in Broos' paintings are often drawn from those closest to her, such as her daughters and grandchildren. She finds inspiration for her nature depictions primarily from her surroundings in Värmland, such as Lake Fryken and the vast forests surrounding its shores. Broos often uses her own photographs as inspiration and support for memory in a painstaking artistic process. Photography is the art form that she claims to value the most, and it is an interest she carried with her from her time studying in the Netherlands. Sometimes, when she doesn't feel finished with a subject, she can paint it again from a different "camera angle."

The "The Red Sofa 2" exists in two versions. The first one is more stripped down, with the red sofa and the model taking up more space in the image. The seemingly everyday situation is ambiguous and charged. In the version currently up for auction, the brushstrokes are more precise, and the artist has left behind the rougher painting style for the photo-realistic. The subject is bathed in warm and comforting light, and the woman in the corner of the sofa is alone but does not exude loneliness.