Dick Bengtsson at Contemporary Art & Design

Dick Bengtsson, 'Stockhus'

The painting 'Stockhus' was part of Dick Bengtsson's legendary exhibition at Galleri Karlsson in Stockholm in 1969. Twenty paintings depicting empty landscapes with houses was included in the exhibition. Viewed from a distance they seemed peaceful, but on several of them the artist had painted swastikas, some visible in the window frames of the houses, some at the corners of the paintings and some in the background. There were also small hooks under the frames on which yellow plastic shovels hung, and black boxes of birch wood were placed on the floor. These peculiar details distorted the, at first glance, harmonious scenes into something much more disturbing. Suddenly, it was no longer landscape paintings that filled the gallery, but rather an ambiguous collection of installations.

'Stockhus' hung at Galleri Karlsson next to a mirrored version of the painting. Both works stood out in the exhibition as they did not contain any swastikas, yet there is something elusive and suspended about them. A solitary log house stands on a hill with a dark spruce forest in the background. The pan has a dark patina that the artist often applied to his paintings by working the painted surface with a hot iron. The result is that the landscape is stripped of all traces of rural idyll. At the same time, Bengtsson's skilful surface treatment enriches the image with a visual beauty freed from all forms of pretension.