Anders Knutsson has been working on the project, which is called “Radical Painting – Meditations on the Monochrome”, since September last year and is excited to have his paintings seen by a Stockholm audience again.

“It’s been 30 years since I last exhibited in Stockholm, so I’m a bit unknown there. But I’m really thrilled about it,” he told Nordstjernan.
Bukowskis is a famous auction house in Stockholm, which has only lately been showing still living artists – they’ve chosen to exhibit two artists a year, and Knutsson is one of them. Much of this is thanks to Michael Storåker, the new CEO at Bukowskis who has decided to give Stockholm galleries a run for their money by putting focus on active artists.

“When a work of art is sold at Bukowskis,” Storåker writes in the introduction of the catalogue, “the name is often already well known to a larger group of art connoisseurs. This is perhaps not the case in this instance. We feel privileged and thrilled to be involved in a reintroduction of such artistry in Sweden. To many of us, he is a mystery man that has been working actively outside the main route of contemporary art. Anders Knutsson’s paintings, flaming monochromes, are refreshingly contemporary.”

Although excited, Knutsson does express some concern about the installation of his pieces.
“I haven’t seen Bukowskis, so I don’t know what it looks like,” he says. “But it’s not your regular white box of course, so we, my curator Bo Nilsson and I, have to be creative when we hang the paintings.”

There will be 21 paintings and a few paintings on hand-made paper – all looking back at the art Knutsson produced in the 1970’s. Lars Nittve, former director at Tate Modern in London and most recently Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, since January 2011 Executive Director at M+, Hong Kong writes: “We may as well say it from the start. Anders Knutsson’s monochromes from the late 1970’s are not only among the best art produced in Sweden during that period. With his wax and oil surfaces, which he applied to carefully selected linen canvas, he gave us paintings that are among the very best ever to have been produced in one of the most difficult, most demanding corners of the ever-widening field of late modernism.”
For more information: Bukowskis Auctions