Torsten Andersson: The Weight of Language

This summer, Marabouparken konsthall is pleased to present the first major solo exhibition by Torsten Andersson (1926–2009) to be shown in Stockholm in forty years. The exhibition includes around thirty paintings from his entire active period as an artist, as well as drawings and one of his early sculptural objects. 

Torsten Andersson is a significant artist in Swedish art history, an artist who influences many of his young artist colleagues today. He participated in major biennials internationally but worked at the same time in opposition to the trends and art circles of his time. He spent most of his artistically active life in what he called “transit” – far from these environments. Yet his work has never been irrelevant or forgotten, he has continued to exist as a given point of reference in the art world. 

Torsten Andersson’s oeuvre is unique – with great integrity and a seriousness that today can feel both unfamiliar and longed for, but which also contains a kind of exhilarating joy and sense of space. He painted in large format, distinct, free-standing forms occupy the surface – paintings that are often a kind of depiction of sculptures. They appear in the visual space with an undeniable weight and presence that is his own. The title of the exhibition refers to this weight expressed in the works, which perhaps has something to do with the physically sculptural nature of the paintings, or to the landscape that is often highlighted as crucial for his artistic choices, a kind of weight of the ground as an inherent, inner quality – but also to the importance he attached to artistic language and the weight it has in his oeuvre. 

About poetry, the French poet Emmanuel Hocquard says, it is “above all, a question of the logical organization of thought”, like “any other area of ​​activity where intelligence wrestles with language”. Undoubtedly, one such area of ​​activity is the painting of Torsten Andersson. This year he would have turned one hundred years old.