ArtistSwedish
Lennart Jirlow
13 active items
Lennart Jirlow painted happiness as a form of resistance. His sunlit cafe terraces, bustling Parisian bistros, and lush Provencal gardens pulse with warmth and human connection, and he was entirely deliberate about it. "I believe a kind act in a painting breeds other kind acts," he said. "In this way, my paintings are a protest, against all the misery in the world." Born on 24 April 1936 in Stockholm, he was accepted into Konstfack at sixteen, the youngest student admitted, and held his first exhibition in Stockholm in 1958. Shortly after, he left for France, where he would live and work for more than sixty years.
France gave Jirlow his subjects. The social life of cafes and restaurants, the play of light on a zinc bar counter, figures leaning together over wine, the clutter of a well-stocked cellar, theatres filling before a performance, and above all the gardens and rolling landscapes of Provence. His palette was warm and saturated, built on oranges, ochres, greens, and the particular blue of a French summer sky. The brushwork was confident and fluid, capturing movement and atmosphere rather than photographic detail. His scenes feel inhabited, the viewer is drawn into the conversation at the next table.
Jirlow's popularity in Sweden remained strong throughout his career, sustained by regular exhibitions and a prolific output that included oils, watercolours, and a substantial body of graphic work. His prints, produced in signed editions, made his imagery accessible to a wide collecting audience. He died on 18 April 2020, six days before his eighty-fourth birthday.
At auction, Jirlow's work appears through major Swedish houses including Bukowskis, Stockholms Auktionsverk, Metropol, and Helsingborgs Auktionskammare. Oil paintings command the highest prices, with a flower still life reaching 43,000 SEK and figurative work at 30,000 SEK. Prints and lithographs form the larger share of the 180 items on Auctionist, reflecting the broad collector base for his accessible, life-affirming imagery.