Bördan (The Burden)

Firestorm Foundation acquired Bördan (The Burden) at Viola Sparre’s 2024-2025 CFHILL show Betraktare, mounted soon after Sparre earned her BFA from Stockholm’s Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design (in the spring of 2024). The catalogue pointed out how Sparre ‘explores deeply personal themes surrounding family dynamics, memories and the psychological landscape of childhood’ before stating:

Viola Sparre’s art reflects a search for identity and belonging, often inspired by her own complex family relationships and private feelings – all expressed with a characteristic raw figurative aesthetic. In her art, Viola Sparre explores questions of identity, attachment and the psychological legacy of growing up with eight siblings. She creates scenes that unite different timelines – past and present merge and form new perspectives on family life.

Sparre’s clever method, ‘that unites different timelines’, is also what sets her work apart and makes it interesting, creating enigmatic scenes that bewilder and captivate the viewer. Sparre has also confirmed, in an interview with Maja Milanovic (‘Entwined in Time: Viola Sparre’s Portrait of Family’, Tarantula: Authors and Art, 6 November 2024), that the artistic approach in question is significant for how her art is depicted and should be perceived:

Since I obviously can’t get inside someone’s head, I work from my own perspective and present the story as I see it. I suppose, as always, my portraits are a kind of self-portrait. I also never really tell the entire story; it is important for me that there is room for the viewer’s own interpretation. Therefore, I feel like ‘the answers,’ if any, are separated from the artwork.

As pointed out by Milanovic (in the aforementioned interview), Sparre’s approach offers viewers the rare chance to reimagine family relationships outside of linear time:

suggesting that healing can occur when we can ‘meet’ our family members in their younger selves. Imagine being four years old and meeting your grandmother at the same age—what questions would you ask? This provocative concept invites audiences to contemplate not only what could be learned but also how such dialogues might influence our understanding of family roles and emotional inheritance. […] In painting the women of her family as ageless contemporaries, Sparre presents a nuanced commentary on the shared struggles, triumphs, and emotional legacies of motherhood, childhood, and beyond. Her work encourages viewers to consider their own familial histories, inspiring a journey inward to explore family dynamics and, perhaps, to find healing within themselves.

That the CFHILL exhibition took place shortly after Sparre’s BFA degree and during her ongoing MFA studies could be sensed from the works on display. What viewers encountered in these thirteen canvases was not only fascinating and captivating but could also be perceived as the embryo of greater and more independent work to come by a talented artist who still drew inspiration from a number of role models. Or as Sparre put it in the interview with Milanovic: ‘I believe it is vital for any new artist to have a few idols to guide them in the beginning, but it is also important to let go and create your own artistic world.’

With one important exception (more on that below), Sparre hasn’t really expounded on the identities of her ‘few idols’. Looking at the exhibited works, one could, however, recall, for instance, Vilhelm Hammershøi’s (1864–1916, Danish painter mainly known for his poetic, subdued interiors) sublime interiors when paying attention to detail (and noticing the row of rooms with half-open doors depicted in the mirror image) in Sparre’s Rum, tomrum, spegel/Room, Void, Mirror (2024, oil on canvas, 200 x 160 cm), while the composition Mamma, mormor, barn/Mother, Grandmother, Children (2024, oil on canvas, 126 x 102 cm) appears to be a mirror-inverted/reversed and updated interpretation of Lucian Freud’s early work Hotel Bedroom (1954, oil on canvas, 91 x 61 cm, Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada).

Sparre’s use of a mirror (admittedly an artistic approach that dates back to the Renaissance or earlier) in the painting Rum, tomrum, spegel can also be seen as confirmation that she is familiar with postwar and contemporary works by celebrated Swedish artists such as Lena Cronqvist (1938–2025) and Ylva Snöfrid (born 1974).

Several of Sparre’s early works (depicting, for example, girls playing with dolls, bathtubs against tiled walls, and rooms with checkered floors), executed in acrylics on canvas or panel, furthermore attest to the artist’s admiration for Cronqvist in particular. A fact confirmed by Sparre:

The painting I created with the small doll figures and the normal-sized girl was the first painting I did. I was really inspired by Lena Cronqvist; she used to paint girls with dolls that symbolised her parents. Her paintings are very attention-grabbing and absurd, yet it was a powerful experience that changed how I view art. It shifted my perception of what art could be. So, I started painting these dolls as me and my siblings, with the girl representing my mother when she was a child. It was an opportunity for me to explore family roles and mother-child dynamics.

This connection (between the established Cronqvist and the younger Sparre) was also apparent in several of the canvases at Betraktare. Not only did one of the exhibited works, Trolovningen/The Betrothal (2023, oil on canvas, 195 x 155 cm), share its title with Cronqvist’s iconic composition from 1974-1975 (oil on canvas, 169 x 125 cm, Värmlands Museum, Karlstad, Sweden), in itself a paraphrase of one of the world’s most famous paintings, Jan van Eyck’s (c. 1390-1441) The Arnolfini Portrait (1434, oil on oak panel, 82 x 60 cm, National Gallery, London, NG186), but several of Sparre’s compositions could also be seen as being directly inspired by Cronqvist.

This applies not least to Bördan, a notably large canvas characterised by a relatively austere composition. Several of Cronqvist’s legendary paintings from the 1970s are also executed in an upright vertical format on large canvases. Notable examples include the aforementioned Trolovningen/The Betrothal, as well as compositions such as Madonna (1976-1977, oil on canvas, 169 x 125 cm).

The latter of these two paintings in particular displays obvious similarities with Sparre’s Bördan. Madonna and Bördan both feature centrally placed women depicted frontally, with a younger woman portrayed in front of an older one. With a little imagination, one can even discern how Sparre references the blue and white textile element (the older woman’s top with white flowers set against a blue background) in Cronqvist’s painting. In Sparre’s work, however, it has been inverted (to a blue pattern set against a white background) and transferred from the older woman’s top to the younger woman’s skirt.

What about the red curtains (a stylistic feature that can be traced back to the magnificent full-length Renaissance portraits of royalty), one half of which is pulled aside by an invisible figure, then? Here, comparisons can possibly be made with Lena Cronqvist’s Pappa och barn II/Dad and Child II (undated, probably early 1990s, oil on canvas, 39 x 34 cm), in which a father, with a little girl on his lap, is depicted centrally in the composition, sitting in a bentwood chair surrounded by two red triangles, that appear to represent drawn curtains, in the upper half of the composition.

Provenance

CFHILL, Stockholm, Betraktare, 22 November 2024-9 January 2025.

Firestorm Foundation (acquired at the above).

Copyright Firestorm Foundation