Charim Galerie

For two decades, Inge Grünwaldt Svensson has been painting a series of seascapes: a flurry of brush strokes in different shades of blue, grey, brown and green below a horizon line. During the winter she primes pieces of paper and cardboard with a layer of acrylic or tempera, and when the weather allows, she brings them to the sea. There, the motif emerges in a moment of fierce concentration, each one with a great sense of intention: the effort of looking, being and sensing distilled into a picture… The seascapes make a monumental, and characteristically quiet, synthesis of the ideas that Grünwaldt Svensson has developed in her art practice across more than six decades. Like the seascapes, her oil paintings can be understood as concentrations of energy, and her soft-point copper prints of old master’s paintings, drawn blindly from memory, as extractions of interior landscapes. It is in their simplicity and seriality that the seascapes grow to become emblematic of the oeuvre, as well as of the art historical shift from modernism’s late international and highly cerebral style, towards subjectivity, embodied practice and – dare we say it – some form of spirituality. – Kristian Vistrup Madsen, 2024

Inge Grünwaldt Svensson (1942, Copenhagen) was admitted to the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts early in the late 1950s. In 1960 Grünwaldt Svensson and her husband, the Swedish artist Ingemar Svensson, moved to Småland in the Swedish forest, where they lived and worked for 60 years in a remote homestead consisting of century-old farmhouses, for years without electricity. From 1972-92 the Svenssons regularly travelled to Greenland, where they also created land art. About 100 kilometres east of Sisimiut they assembled 650 stones into a line several hundred metres long, “The Qoullotokk Line” they called it, which still exists today. For Grünwaldt Svensson, art is essentially what follows the structure of nature of its own accord. Charim Galerie first showed Inge Grünwaldt Svensson’s work in 2024 in the exhibition “Play It As It Lays”, curated by Kristian Vistrup Madsen during the international gallery festival “Curated by”. Inge Grünwaldt Svensson lives and works in southern Sweden.