ArtistSwedish
Bengt Ågren
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Bengt Albin Ågren was born on 8 March 1936 in Karlskrona and grew up in Kalmar, the city that would define his practice throughout his life. He was the son of the professional painter Axel Walfrid Ågren, and that background gave him an early familiarity with artistic craft before he became self-taught in his own right. He began painting seriously in 1957 during a stay on Öland and developed his eye through study trips to France, Belgium, Morocco, Denmark, Russia, Germany, Austria, and England.
Ågren worked in oil and drawing, and his range was broad: landscapes, interiors, still lifes, figure studies, and formal portraits. Among his portrait subjects were publicist Herbert Tingsten, parliament speaker Johan Bergvall, and county governor Gustaf Andersson. His public commission work includes an iron relief at the Naval Officers' School (Nautical Officers' School) in Kalmar.
In the mid-1960s Ågren undertook a sustained documentary project, drawing a long series of Kalmar street environments that were being demolished or transformed by modernisation. The series, which included views of streets such as Svarta-Gatan on Kattrumpan, now serves as a visual record of a city that no longer exists in that form. That combination of artistic and civic purpose ran through his career.
He exhibited alongside Ingemar Nilsson and Erik Karlsson in Kalmar and Nybro in 1964, and was a regular participant in traveling exhibitions with ABF Kalmar and in collective shows with the Småland Artists' Association (Smålands konstförening). A memorial exhibition was held in Kalmar after his death on 13 December 2016.
His work is held in the collections of Kalmar Museum, the Modern Museum in Silkeborg, Denmark, and the Växjö City Collections.
On Auctionist, 33 works by Ågren have appeared at auction. Sales are concentrated at Kalmar-area houses, led by Kalmar Auktionsverk with 18 lots, followed by Auktionskammaren Sydost Kalmar and Auktionsfirma Kenneth Svensson i Kalmar. The highest recorded result is 3,883 SEK for an oil depicting Sergels Torg before the Stockholm demolitions of the 1960s, a fitting record for a painter who made urban memory his subject.