Some Words About Violet Tengberg

Violet Tengberg, born in Sweden 1920, deceased 2014, had her residence and painter’s studio in Gothenburg. She worked with paintings in oil on canvass and on enamel, drawings, water-colours, pastels and litographic works.

As an artist she was educated at the renowned Valand School of Fine Art, Gothenberg University. Complementary with her art work, she also for many years studied Art History and History of religions at the same university, earning a Master. She wrote about the English painter and poet William Blake. At first “The Tyger from Songs of Innocence and of Experience”, and then a Master thesis about the philosophy behind Blake´s creative work.

She travelled to most countries in Europe as well as to countries in other parts of the world to study art and culture. Violet Tengberg had her first one-man exhibition in Stockholm in 1965 and continued to exhibit in Helsinki, London Brussels, Paris, Rome and later also in New Delhi, India. She has taken part in more than a hundred group exhibitions almost all over the world, whereof the latest were in Japan and Germany.

She is represented in many museums, such as Modern Art Museum, Stockholm; Gothenburg Art Museum; Musée de Pau, la Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris; Ministère des Affaires Culturelles, France; The Royal Family Collection,UK; The British Library, London; The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; The Vatican Museum, Rome; The National Museum, New Delhi and The Government Museum Chandigarh, India.

She received some distinguished awards such as The City of Gothenburg Honorary Award for cultural achievement and the Bronze Medal at the Europe Prize of Painting, Ostende, Belgium; She was appointed Accademico Associato, Accademia Tiberina, Rome;, and Premio Adelaide Ristori, Centro Culturale Italiano, Rome. Alongside with her painting, Violet Tengberg also wrote poetry, mostly in English. And she published several books, amongst them "Vision of the World Egg", "Studies and whispers" (2004), and " Microcosmos - Macrocosmos" (2005).

Mr. Teddy Brunius, Professor of Art History at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, wrote essays about her work, and in one them he states that: "Her art, with its intensity of colour and shimmering symbolism, is not shut for the spectator but opens like an enormous stage of transformation. That which can be experienced on the stage is universally valid." Eugène Ionesco, the French dramaturge and member of l´Academie Francaise, with whom she had a joint picture exhibition in Stockholm, wrote to her: " To Violet, with the joy of having exhibited together with a true painter."

Retrospective exhibitions will commence in autumn 2015, beginning in Ystad with an opening on the 11th of October.