Lena Cronqvist

Lena Cronqvist has consistently and curiously explored what it truly means to be human throughout her entire career as an artist. She has depicted humanity in its most vulnerable situations, from the defenseless newborn to the elderly man on his deathbed. In between, she has sculpted with color and painted the children's play, the clumsy attempts at tenderness by adults, and their longing for love. Using herself as a model, she has questioned the self and the individual's role in relation to the collective.

Cronqvist possesses a unique ability to blur and blend the boundaries between the inner space and the external reality, personal experience and general historical narratives, the highly personal and the universal. Over the years, there has also been an ironic tone in the artist's body of work, as if Cronqvist is keen to show that what she creates are ultimately just images and that reality exists beyond them.

In 1984, Cronqvist saw two dance performances by the German choreographer Pina Bausch and her troupe Wuppertal Tanztheater when they visited Stockholm. The encounter with dance and the total experience it provided for Cronqvist was decisive for a series of new paintings. Moving from depicting isolation and individuality, these works involved an exploration of interaction, where figures draw closer to each other, touch each other, dance, and kiss. In the current painting, "The Dance," we meet a dancing woman with six onlookers who respond to the woman's movement in various ways.

Since her debut in 1965 at Galerie Pierre in Stockholm, Lena Cronqvist has uncompromisingly and consistently continued to approach the human mystery, both in painting and, later, in sculpture.