Leif Elggren – B: painting myself back to Y
01.03 – 28.03.2024
Private View Thursday 29.02 at 5-7 PM
In an essay written in 2017, Leif Elggren described how his work with the colours yellow and black "generated new means to look upon the world". In 2022, I curated the group exhibition Their happiest days were the dark and vast days of rain, which was conceived around the idea of treating the artists as spectators. Elggren took part with the painting series Black: To paint myself back to Yellow (2021). These abstract paintings are just as open for interpretation as they are concrete – a meditation on the meeting between the brightest and darkest of colours. This text will combine themes from that exhibition with new strands in order to frame Elggren’s work by discussing how the relations between human sight, blindness, and visionary work have been understood in visual art, literature, and philosophy.
– an excerpt from the exhibition text A Blind Seeing by Camilla Larsson
Leif Elggren was born 1950 in Linköping.
Lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden.
Active since the late 1970s, Leif Elggren has become one of the most constantly surprising conceptual artists to work in the combined worlds of audio and visual. Elggren is also a writer, visual artist, stage performer and composer. His soundscapes, often conceived as the soundtrack to a visual installation or experimental stage performance, usually presents carefully selected sound sources over a long stretch of time and can range from quiet electronics to harsh noise. Elggren’s wide-ranging and prolific body of art often involves dreams and subtle absurdities, social hierarchies turned upside-down, hidden actions and events taking on the quality of icons like the combination of colors yellow & black. Together with the artist Carl Michael von Hausswolff, he is a founder of the Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland (KREV) where he enjoys the title of King.
Elggren spent five years at the Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, dedicated to drawing, painting and bookprinting. In the late 70s he began to associate with performance groups. He formed Firework in 1978, together with Thomas Liljenberg, a duo that put up exhibitions and performances and a small publishing company (Firework Edition). Around the same time he purchased an old letterpress machine and started to publish artists’ books. In 1988 he formed the duo Guds Söner (The Sons of God) with Kent Tankred, whom he had met some years earlier. The duo excels in creating long, puzzling stage performances that give equal roles to physical action (or inaction) and soundtracks (live or taped) and are now more focused on dance performances.
Together with Hausswolff, Elggren represented Sweden in the Nordic Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2001 (with Tommi Grönlund and Petteri Nisunen from Finland and Anders Tomren from Norway).
