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Helene Billgren – "the danger is over"

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Helene Billgren, "the danger is over"

11 October to 8 December

This autumn's exhibition, titled "the danger is over", will be a pattern of Helene Billgren's artistry, from the drawings and objects of the 1980s and 1990s to the increasingly colour-intensive painting of the 21st century. 

Liljevalchs wants to showcase one of Sweden's most unrelenting and creative artists in full character. It is an artistry that contains as much playfulness and improvisation as the deepest seriousness. Her protagonists are almost always women, her material mundane and she gives everyday and old things a new meaning.

Open today 11-17

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Liljevalchs

Helene Billgren in her studio. Photo: Johan Strindberg

"Even during her art studies at Valand in Gothenburg in the 1980s, Helene Billgren emerged as a living all-art work: an unending and lovely person with a unique ability to sneak toxic seriousness into an ostensibly innocent imagery," says Liljevalch's manager Mårten Castenfors.

Adventure/adventure. Photo: Galleri Magnus Karlsson
Self-portrait, 1985. Photo: Nora Bencivenni/Galleri Magnus Karlsson

Liljevalchs presents the expressive paintings of recent years in the large halls in the middle and is surrounded by the past with objects, graphics, drawings and illustrations. But the nuet's preoccupation with painting can also be interrupted and transitioned into new objects and installations – anything is possible in Billgren's world. 

The exhibition produces a catalogue entitled "My 100 Favorites" where Helene Billgren has chosen from her production. Two previous texts by the artist are also published for the selection.

"With her way of handling colour, Helene Billgren shows that she is one of the foremost painters in Sweden today: so healthy, so beautiful, so cheeky, so fateful, yet always relaxed and visually intoxicating," Mårten Castenfors writes in the catalogue foreword.

Film by Alexander Dahl

Helene Billgren was born in 1952 in Norrköping and educated at Valand School of Fine Arts in Gothenburg from 1982 to 1987. She had her first solo exhibition at Galleri Rotor in Gothenburg in 1985 and made her breakthrough in 1989 with three exhibitions in Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö. Here the audience met nurses, horse girls and housewives, girl women drawn in charcoal and pencil who tried different roles in everyday life, play and seriousness.

The exhibition Free Kitten at Angelika Knäpper Gallery in Stockholm in 2009 was her breakthrough as a painter. The young women remain but now in colour-saturated, dramatic or dreamy landscapes.

A third part that has been included early in her creation is the objects and box installations, small everyday objects that have been recycled and in the reuse given a new meaning.

She has also done set design and costume, including for Riksteatern and Den Anden Opera in Copenhagen.

Djurgårdsvägen 60
Stockholm, 11521 Sverige

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