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Lot Essay
In a decade where artists were subverting traditional methods of representation, led by the American movements of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, Lena Cronqvist nonetheless insisted on figurative painting and highly subjective subject matter, an outlook she has maintained to the present day. Her signature style is characterised by full-body portraits of children, particularly girls, in seemingly playful activities which at a closer look reveal disturbing, even grotesque situations. In a number of paintings, the children are depicted with dolls, which represent their parents. Sometimes rather innocently playing with them in doll-house like scenarios, reversing the hierarchical order of the family, at other times the dolls are subjected to violent torture and sexual humiliation. There is an overt sense of the struggle and unease associated with growing up in these works, an element which is far from lost in her more recent portraits of herself as an elderly woman, where the concern is now with growing older. The order is changed, and the girls have become dolls controlled by her in acts that have an air of desperation of letting go.
Vilken hand? (Which Hand?) is one of Cronqvist's autobiographical childhood subjects. The composition is simple, but the atmosphere is highly charged, creating an uneasy but intense viewing experience which is similar to that evoked in Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra's photographs of young people and Paula Rego's portrayals of twisted children. A young girl stands alone on a beach, her expression unusually reflective for her age, and distinctly sad. Her features, comparable to photographs of Cronqvist as a child, are echoed throughout her oeuvre in the figure of the older of two sisters. The title of the painting suggests she hides two items in her hands on her back, from which an implicit person in front of her can choose only one. Are these items the dolls of her parents so frequently present in Cronqvist's other works? The vulnerability of the child, lonely and despondent despite joined by a cat and a dog, is chilling and acquires an existential quality. This is one of Cronqvist's most emblematic pictures, at once subdued and dramatic, personal and universal.
Vilken hand? (Which Hand?) is one of Cronqvist's autobiographical childhood subjects. The composition is simple, but the atmosphere is highly charged, creating an uneasy but intense viewing experience which is similar to that evoked in Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra's photographs of young people and Paula Rego's portrayals of twisted children. A young girl stands alone on a beach, her expression unusually reflective for her age, and distinctly sad. Her features, comparable to photographs of Cronqvist as a child, are echoed throughout her oeuvre in the figure of the older of two sisters. The title of the painting suggests she hides two items in her hands on her back, from which an implicit person in front of her can choose only one. Are these items the dolls of her parents so frequently present in Cronqvist's other works? The vulnerability of the child, lonely and despondent despite joined by a cat and a dog, is chilling and acquires an existential quality. This is one of Cronqvist's most emblematic pictures, at once subdued and dramatic, personal and universal.