Bengt Lindström
Bengt Karl Erik Lindström (September 3, 1925, Berg Municipality — January 29, 2008, Sundsvall) was a Swedish artist.
Lindström was one of Sweden's best known contemporary artists with a characteristic style of distinct colors, often including contorted faces.
He was only three days old when Sámi King Kroik, his godfather, administered the "Baptism of the Earth", where the child is placed between two roots of a tree to grant him protection from the Gods.
Bengt grew up in the vast landscape of Sápmi (sometimes referred to as Lapland), with mountain ranges, glistening lakes and endless forests.
The Sámi people, as well as local lumberjacks, would tell Bengt about the tales and legends of the Great White North.
In 1946, Bengt travelled to the United States to study at the Art Institute of Chicago[3] and was inspired there by the work of De Kooning.
Bengt was granted a scholarship by the Swedish magazine Aftontidningen, which helped him move into a workshop in Arcueil, France.
Lindström was influenced by and often based his work on the ethnic traditions of the Nordic world and Sámi culture.
[7] Unlike the COBRA group, Lindström used his paint by the bucket, with heavy applications of mostly primary and secondary saturated colours, using his fingers as well as big brushes.
While working in an atelier in the Alicante region, he completed "Novelda", an album of lithographs featuring poems by Spanish poet Paco Pastor.
In association with Sydkraft and the municipality of Örebro, he painted a fresco on a 17 meters high tank with a surface area of 3,000 m2 located at the crossroads of major Swedish motorways.
In Ånge, Lindström created a 6.5 meter high "Tången" sculpture, made of painted concrete, which was inaugurated in the presence of the King and Queen of Sweden.
He created "Kåtan Mimi", an 8 x 9 meter Sámi tent, for the town of Arjeplog in Swedish Sápmi.
At the end of the seventies, he started with glass sculpturing, making thirty dishes and goblets for renowned Swedish glassmaker Kosta Boda.
Close to his birthplace, Bengt painted gigantic tarpaulins over forty metres high, covering the slopes of the neighbouring Våladalen Mountain, as a protest against the construction of a dam.
Lindström also painted several Volvo model cars and all sides of a lorry for Scania, Sweden's main truck manufacturer.
Throughout his life exhibitions were held in Europe and the United States, earning him a solid reputation among the public and his peers.
The collection was later donated and transferred to the Länsmuseet i Västernorrland in Härnösand, Sweden, where a special room was prepared to host "The Great Aesir Gods".
