Blue Reconciliation

Ernst Billgren

Oil on panel, including frame made by the artist. Signed EB. Provenance: Ekerum Konsthall, 2017. Ernst Billgren is one of Sweden's most original and recognizable artists who naturally moves between painting, sculpture, graphics, scenography and literature. Born in 1957 in Stockholm, he had his breakthrough in the 1980s and has since established himself as a central and influential figure in Nordic contemporary art. Billgren's artistry is characterized by a unique combination of classical imagery and contemporary ideas. With inspiration from art history, especially older painting, he builds up visual worlds where animals, landscapes and human traces meet in unexpected and often humorous constellations. What can first be experienced as beautiful and harmonious often contains an underlying irony and sharp reflection on taste, value and what art really is. Ernst Billgren has made animals one of his most characteristic and recurring motifs - and perhaps it is precisely here that his artistry becomes most recognizable. In his visual world, animals such as foxes, hares, birds and deer often appear, painted with technical skill that brings to mind older masters. But with Billgren, the animals are never just nature studies; they carry something more. The animals function as mirrors of human behavior and emotional life. They move in environments that sometimes feel taken from classical landscape painting, but where something grates - a look, a position or a situation that suggests stories beyond the idyllic