Torsten Renqvist, Vägvisare, skulptur och grafik

Stockholm, January 14 – February 20, 2021

Galleri Andersson/Sandström are proud to present our first exhibition with the estate of artist Torsten Renqvist. In the exhibition Vägvisare, skulptur och grafik we will show a selection of sculpture and graphic prints.

” IN TORSTEN RENQVIST’S ROOM”

On 14 November 1971, Torsten Renqvist writes in his diary: “Someone says that by the year 2000, people will have a greater need than today of quiet places, of sacred but secular rooms. I’ve had that thought myself for some years now. For this kind of room, I’d like to make sculptures.”

Lucid and critical, Torsten Renqvist moved in both the present and past. When he interpreted the signs he found, he also perceived the outlines of a potential future. He gave up painting in 1967. One of the reasons was that the signs appearing on the surfaces lacked the concreteness he sought in the descriptions of the world he saw around him and his own place in it.

His alternative was a sculptural work that, in its complexity, is unique when it comes to asking the big and complex questions. His deep humanism manifests itself in every plug that joins the limbs to the torso, in every incision with the knife that makes the blind sighted and the sighted blind.

We see many secular rooms around us – but sacred? It is mostly about whose admittance is permitted.
The rooms become surfaces on which both feet and eyes slip. Torsten Renqvist was right about his own future: The rooms take on meaning and serenity. His work lives in this.

Stockholm in November forty-eight years later.

Olle Granath

Works in the exhibition: