Olle Bonniér – Healing the Earth in Norrköping Art Museum

Visionary concrete and meets contemporary – Olle Bonniér seems clear in Norrköping

Olle Bonniér in the Norrköping Art Museum

Have it ever There was a more difficult generation than the Swedish golden boys who went into the world after the Second World War? Ideal self -assured young people who would re -build culture that were brought into waste of the war were saved themselves. In The Visual Arts, 1947 men launched a non-figurative painting that would monitor both the color and the character of the shape if the modern Sweden would design the shape. L’Art Pour L’art and applied art. In the Emerging Welfare Society you could both have and eat the cake?

The youngest in the group was Olle Bonniér Which is now being opened large in the Norrköping Art Museum. Bonniér was born in Los Angeles in 1925, discovered art early, got a mentor in the old national romantic Gustaf Fjæstad and was hired as a freedom Isaac Grünewalds Painting school. The retrospective in Norrköping is a tribute portrait, so you have to stand for the historical context yourself. The works are also presented in thematic chapters instead of chronologically, making it difficult to get the development of Bonniér over time.

I am stuck in front The well -known painting “Progressive Vault Temperation” (1948), consisting of straight lines against a light background that is said to be 21 shades of white. A little more typical than this hyperesthetic fine, I find it difficult to imagine. At the same time, the painting on Bonniérs points to the idea of ​​working in the sense that the knowledge that it consists of 21 shades will have its own life, regardless of whether the viewer perceives them or not.

Five years earlier he had outlined a huge color membrane that would be stretched between the King Tower in Stockholm. The idea has never been realized, and here are various sketches for similar projects such as “Fire Routes Through The Sahara” (1958) – a 147 -meter high water that would be Leviet in the middle of the desert – and “Light play play” (1948), An idea for a kind of beautiful light.

Otherwise The concept art that began to talk to the end of the sixties, in Bonniér it is not about reducing art into a linguistically mediated idea, but about ideas intended to be realized on a direct sensual level such as sound or light.

But it is certainly tempting to regard him as a prehistoric conceptualist, whose ideas could be based on ideas – but should not necessarily be realized. In that sense, his famous Plingeling paintings from the late 1940s can also be considered as based on ideas. They consist of colors against a white surface, and Bonniér saw them as “sound sculptures”, although it would take thirty years before they were actually performed by musicians.

A consequence of the method of Bonniér is that the relationship between form and content can feel loose, as if what you see is just one of the many possible versions of an idea. Even a superficial expressive painting that “Gilgamesh ”(1959) – With its color explosions against a dark background – feels strange and distant. It is as if there are only influences and reactions on the world outside in Bonniér. What is in him is not told.

The three meters wide The painting “Ödestta” (1950) is all the more charged. The dark crossed lines for the thoughts of iron beams, or, as the title suggests, a fatal visual symphony. I feel that I hear the painting as much as I see it, and that I feel it just like I experience it. I don’t think you should know that it was added after a trip through Germany to understand that it is about Europe after the war.

With Bonniér it is different the non -translimental view ahead and out that applies. In the 1960s he was inspired by the space age, in the 1970s by the cosmology of the Maya culture. He travels and works further, he summarizes the impressions in a monumental installation that resumed in the large exhibition hall of the museum with almost six meters in ceilings. The color is freed from its ground and floats away like a dynamic movement through the room. I dare to promise that it is one of the most maxima that can now be seen in the Kunstpad in Sweden.

In the 1980s Parodyed the postmodern WallAgrups concrete’s optimism by simulating their colors and shapes, but as the end of artifacts. When the idea of ​​the positive role of art in society has been given a second breathing – and many people think that it will again realize the constructive ideals of that time, instead of criticizing them – there is a desire for Utopians such as Bonniér. In this way the exhibition ends exactly in time, but the title “Healing the Earth” is too demanding. It catches the boundless self -confidence of the artist in itself, but at that time the museum could have tagged a little.

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