Bengt Lindström

Bengt Karl Erik Lindström is one of Sweden’s best-known contemporary artists, internationally respected for his vivid colours and powerful rendering of human themes.

He received an international education at the Isaac Grunewald College of Art in Stockholm, the Copenhagen Academy of Fine Arts, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the United States. Later Lin moved to Paris to study with French painters André Lot and Fernand Léger. He continued to develop his best-known art of masks, deities and monster figures in a studio of Rue Marmaisin.

Lindström is best known for his large-scale works, such as oil and acrylic works, murals and colourful sculptures, but he used a wide variety of media, including glass, drypoint, tapestry, graffiti art, lithography and engraving. Lindström is heavily influenced by, and often based on, the national traditions of the Nordic world and Sami culture. He is also influenced by the paintings of the COBRA group, unlike them, Lindström uses buckets of paint and applies primary and secondary saturated colours liberally using his fingers and large brushes.

Bengt Lindström’s work has been exhibited in museums around the world, earning him a good reputation among the public and his peers. For example, the Exposition du Nouveau Réalité, Paris, France, 1952. the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Ghent, Belgium, 1961. the Museum of Modern Art, Göteborg, Sweden, 1966. the Carnegie Institution, USA, 1967. the Museo de Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain, 1986. the Museo de Arte dei Lavine, Italy, 1993. the Exposition Universelle de Hamburg, Germany, 2001.