Windmill
Signed Evert Lundquist and dated 1989 verso. Canvas 81 x 65 cm.
The great masters of art history such as Rembrandt, Chardin and van Gogh led Evert Lundquist to pastose painting, where lines, shapes and colours are born simultaneously. He himself has said: "I drift until I get to the point where it smells hot."
Evert Lundquist depicts the unassuming, like a shovel, a candle, a ladder, a tree or - as in the auction painting - a windmill, in an open field. Evert Lundquist's minimalist motifs gain their intensity through highly simplified forms, almost dissolved by the masses of colour.
With the colour paste applied, the works appear to be spontaneous, but Evert Lundquist actually painted slowly, waiting for the various forms to appear in the picture.
Through his visionary yet surprisingly simple painting, Lundquist became one of the most important artists of his generation. He represented Sweden at the Sao Paolo Biennale, where he won a prize, and was selected for the Guggenheim International Award in New York in 1964 for the world's 100 best artists, as well as the Dunn International at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Canada and the Tate Gallery in London. A few years before his death, his eyesight was badly affected, but he continued to paint until the end.
Evert Lundquist is represented at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York, Tate Gallery in London, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Moderna Muséet in Stockholm, Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, Norrköpings konstmuseum, Malmö Museum, Göteborgs Konstmuseum, Kalmar konstmuseum and museums in Umeå, Linköping, Eskilstuna, Värmland and Västergötland.
Moderna Museet has shown several major retrospective exhibitions of Evert Lundquist's paintings.