Torsten Andersson Eng

TORSTEN ANDERSSON (1926-2009)
”CARL LARSSONS BAKDÖRR MED BLODFÄRGAD SKUGGA II” (2006) (Carl Larsson’s back door with blood coloured shadow II)

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In Swedish

In the Carl Larsson painting Ulf i aftonsol (Ulf in the Evening Sun) from 1889, we see the glimpse of a small figure behind a half-open gate in a fence. The figure is Ulf; Karin and Carl Larsson’s two year old son. The entire painting vibrates with warm red colours, and the evening sun almost seems to have set the red barn at the far end of the picture on fire. The shadows are long and the warm late summer evening marks the end of the bright summer evenings, and gives a hint of the chill that appears in the shadows when the sun has set behind farm houses and trees. The small child is standing right where the remaining sunlight and the chill of the garden cross paths. The painting is not a portrait of the son Ulf, it is rather an intense emotional expression. In a very interesting text, Carl-Johan Malmberg has suggested that the painting could possibly be a self-portrait, where the artist is the one balancing the sunny side of life with the melancholy and sadness of the darkness.

Torsten Andersson’s painting Carl Larsson’s back door with blood coloured shadow II was first displayed in 2006, as part of a solo exhibition at Galleri Brändström & Stene in Stockholm. The following year, this wayward painter received the grand prize at the Carnegie Art Awards. In the gallery exhibition, the viewer could observe that all of the paintings were sprung from a methodical, and surely strenuous, (we know that the artist threw away at least 90 out of a 100 drawings) process where the typical Andersson approach had ruled. With inspiration from the Carl Larsson painting, Torsten Andersson hade reduced, created, re-shaped, highlighted, found new paths and finally produced the paradoxical spatiality with his almost abstract paintings. The intensive blood red colour makes the painting vibrate with life and the black shadow offers not only a resting space for the eye, but rather an opportunity for the viewer to partake of the infinite blackness of space. Carl Larsson’s back door with blood coloured shadow II is a majestic painting, silent and quaint while at the same time full of signifying shapes. As in Carl Larsson’s supposed self-portrait, could it be that we are seeing the character of Torsten Andersson; the independent painter who, completely uninterested in the currents of time, chose to pave his own way, the third way - misunderstood at first but hugely appreciated and loved with time? Maybe so. Torsten Andersson was not, however, interested in emphasizing himself. When he received the Carnegie Art Award at the age of 81 he said: “You are left to the mercy of the audience, you cannot work without a recipient. The recipients are just as important as the art. The two are more important than the artist himself ”.

Torsten Andersson (1926-2009) was one of the most important Swedish painters of the late 20th century. He studied at Otte Sköld's painting school, the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and later at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, where he was later appointed as a professor at the record age of 34. Torsten Andersson often emphasized the exhibition he made in 1966 at Galleri Burén as the decisive factor for his artistic work and that everything he did afterwards was a unit where one piece of the puzzle was added to the other. Torsten Andersson's art has been the subject of many exhibitions and he is represented at the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm, the National Museum of Fine Arts, the Malmö Art Museum, the Helsingborg Museum and in a number of important private collections.