ArtistSwedish
Karin Broos
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Karin Broos was born in Uppsala in 1950 and trained at the Royal Academy St. Joost in 's-Hertogenbosch in the Netherlands. Since 1975 she has lived and worked in Värmland, a forested province in west-central Sweden whose landscape - the lake Fryken, the dark stands of spruce, the village of Östra Ämtervik where she settled with her husband Marc - has shaped the visual vocabulary of her entire output.
Her paintings work from photographs. She shoots her subjects first, then translates the image into large-scale oil on canvas, a process that lets her examine the gap between lens and hand, between the frozen instant of photography and the accumulated time of painting. The subjects are few and deliberate: women standing at a bathing jetty, children sleeping, figures at bathroom mirrors, domestic interiors filmed in the particular northern light that falls through Värmland windows in different seasons. Most of her models come from her own family - daughters, grandchildren - which gives the work an intimacy that keeps it from becoming merely technical exercise.
The emotional register is cool and ambivalent. Surfaces that look serenely idyllic - sunlit water, white linen, a child's sleeping face - carry an undercurrent of unease. Her figures often face away from the viewer, absorbed in their own world, inaccessible. Critics have reached for Edward Hopper as a reference point, and the comparison holds in a specific sense: Broos shares Hopper's ability to make stillness feel charged, to suggest that something has just happened or is about to. She herself has mentioned blues music as an analogy for the quality she is after - beauty and sorrow running together in the same phrase.
Her public breakthrough came with a solo exhibition at Kristinehamns Konstmuseum in 2008. In 2015-2016, Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde in Stockholm mounted a major retrospective titled Still Life, containing around fifty works, which then toured five American cities across 2017 and 2018: Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Seattle, Washington D.C., and Chicago. The 2023 exhibition Black Sun at Liljevalchs in Stockholm was her most extensive show to date, presenting new works alongside an accompanying monograph, Moments of Life. She has also exhibited at Sven-Harrys Konstmuseum, Borås Konstmuseum, Vandalorum, and Värmlands Museum.
Her work is held in the collections of Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Statens konstrad, Ystads Konstmuseum, Värmlands Museum, Eksjö Museum, and Dalarnas Museum.
On the Nordic auction market, Broos appears most actively through Karlstad Hammarö Auktionsverk - reflecting her geographical rootedness in Värmland - alongside Bukowskis Stockholm and regional houses. Of the 16 items tracked on Auctionist, paintings and prints are the primary categories. The top recorded sale is "Det vita linnet" at 7,500 SEK at Bukowskis, with prints and graphic works selling in the 500-1,000 SEK range. Collectors seeking her larger oil paintings generally encounter them through Bukowskis' Contemporary Art & Design auctions, where she has appeared at several editions.