ArtistSwedish
Lennart Aschenbrenner
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Lennart Aschenbrenner was born on November 16, 1943, in Perstorp in northern Skane, the son of painter Guido Aschenbrenner and his wife Inga, born Bengtsson. Growing up in a household shaped by the visual arts, he began formal training early: first at Skånska målarskolan in Malmö from 1960 to 1961, then with the Copenhagen-based painter Robert Askou-Jensen in 1962, before enrolling at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, where he studied from 1962 to 1968. Among his teachers there was Lennart Rodhe, a key figure in Swedish post-war constructivism whose influence on how Aschenbrenner thought about surface and structure can be traced across decades of work.
His debut came in 1963 in a group exhibition organized by Skane's art association at Galleri Thalia in Malmö, alongside Gert Aspelin and Gunnar Nordin. His first solo exhibition followed in 1967 at Galleri Observatorium in Stockholm. By then he had already made his first two lithographs - "Tidsbild" and "Pa Stadion," both dated 1965 and printed from two plates each - establishing an engagement with printmaking that would run through his entire career.
Aschenbrenner's work pivots on a particular act of attention: picking up something discarded, overlooked, or worn - a rusty bottle cap, a shaving brush, an ice cream stick, a piece of torn wrapping paper - and placing it at the center of a composition so that it accumulates presence and weight. The subject matter is modest by design; the canvases are often large. This tension between the scale of the support and the smallness of the motif generates the quiet drama his work is known for. The same instinct runs through his lithographs and silkscreen prints, where the repeated, numbered edition becomes a kind of democratic distribution of attention for things usually ignored.
Over six decades he has worked across oil on canvas, lithography, silkscreen, etching, watercolor, and mixed media. Recurring motifs include hats, shoes, flies, pens, sticks, and letters - everyday objects that hover between still life and symbol. He has also made artist books in collaboration with writers, including a bibliophile volume with texts by Niklas Radstrom accompanied by twelve signed etchings. The series "Tre diptyker till Guido" - three diptychs made as serigraphs and dedicated to his father - shows the personal dimension that runs beneath the apparently detached surface of his object world.
In 2004, Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde in Stockholm hosted a major retrospective titled "Aschenbrenner Fyra decennier" (Four Decades), accompanied by a catalogue published by Bokforlaget Arena. The exhibition drew together work from across forty years of practice. Aschenbrenner is represented in the collections of Moderna Museet, the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, and the British Museum in London, as well as in regional Swedish collections. Grafikens Hus and Litografiska Museet have both presented solo exhibitions of his graphic work.
On the Swedish auction market, Aschenbrenner appears regularly at houses across Skane and Stockholm. The 51 lots on Auctionist span auction houses including Garpenhus Auktioner, Crafoord Auktioner Lund, Stockholms Auktionsverk Magasin 5, and Limhamns Auktionsbyrå. His top recorded auction result in the database stands at 2,800 SEK for an oil on canvas dated 1962. Prints - lithographs and serigraphs from the 1960s through the 2000s - represent the majority of auction appearances, typically selling in the 300-1,000 SEK range, with larger-format serigraphs reaching up to 700 SEK.