ArtistSwedish
Lars Tärning
1 active items
Lars Tärning was born in Norrköping in 1945 and moved to Stockholm in 1965, settling in a city that would remain his base as both an artist and an observer of the Swedish landscape. He trained at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm from 1969 to 1974, a period that gave him technical grounding during years when Swedish art was torn between conceptual experiment and a renewed interest in the crafts of painting.
Tärning came down firmly on the side of craft. He developed a working method built around layer painting on primed wooden panels, applying thin coats of oil paint with varnish between each layer. The technique is slow and exacting, requiring patience and an eye attuned to how color shifts as it dries under a resinous surface. The finished paintings have a luminous, almost lacquered quality, with surfaces that pull light into them rather than reflecting it flatly. It is a method with roots in older Northern European panel painting, though Tärning's subjects and sensibility are entirely his own.
His still lifes are the works for which he is best known at auction, and they deserve to be looked at carefully. Pears, peaches, apples, citrus fruit: the subjects are simple, even spare, set against plain backgrounds that give the eye nowhere to go but to the object itself. The illusionism is precise. Each fruit carries its weight and its individual surface, whether the soft bloom on a peach or the waxy skin of a lemon. There is nothing decorative in the arrangement; the compositions feel arrived at rather than designed. Tärning's still lifes belong to a long tradition of Nordic object painting, sharing something of the Swedish 1800s naturalists in their refusal of embellishment, though executed with a contemporary economy of means.
Beyond the studio, Tärning has worked outdoors, painting the Swedish coast and winter landscapes. A work such as "Vinter på Torå stenstrand" shows the same controlled attention that distinguishes his still lifes brought to bear on the cold light and bare stones of a Swedish winter shoreline. His cityscape paintings, including views of Stockholm's Östermalm, extend the same observational approach to architecture and street.
The gallery representation that has accompanied his career, including GalleriLi in Skärkind, has kept his work in circulation outside the auction market. But it is through Metropol in Stockholm that his name is most consistently encountered by collectors today, that house accounting for the large majority of his auction appearances.
At auction, Tärning's oil paintings have sold predominantly in the range of 1,500 to 2,600 SEK, with fruit still lifes such as "Päron" and "Persikor" representing his strongest results. The consistency of subject and technique across decades of work has made him a reliable presence in the market for Swedish contemporary realism.