Lena Cronqvist at Nancy Margolis Gallery

The exhibition, entitled Self-Portraits and Girls: Painting, Sculpture and Prints, is Cronqvist's first New York showing in this decade and only the third in a career spanning more than 40 years.  It features a series of self-portraits created in New York in early 2006. 

From the time of her first exhibition in 1965, Lena Cronqvist has held a unique position in Swedish art, and is recognized as one of Scandinavia's foremost living artists. Entering the field when the art world was dominated by abstract expressionism, Cronqvist took a very different path, turning instead to realism. In her art, Cronqvist explores in detail psychological and autobiographical themes of family, childhood, love, loneliness and loss.

Over the course of her career, Cronqvist has worked in a broad range of media that include sculpture, drawing, textiles and prints. Her subject matter has remained intimate and resolutely self-referential. Exposing her inner and outer life, raw, unfiltered, without apology or censorship, she has depicted family conflicts, episodes of madness and hospitalization, and the death of her husband, the renowned Swedish fiction writer Göran Tunström.  As curator and critic Mårten Castenfors has noted, "In Sweden, Cronqvist was the key that opened the door to expressive and subjective contemporary art.   She made it legitimate to paint big – and private."

Self-Portraits and Girls: Painting, Sculpture and Prints
by Lena Cronqvist
Nancy Margolis Gallery
523 West 25th Street
October 19 to December 16, 2006

For more information: www.nancymargolisgallery.com

Image: Self-Portrait with Mirror & Mitten, 2006