Harry Booström ~ Screenprint

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  • Harry Booström ~ Screenprint
  • Harry Booström ~ Screenprint alternative image
  • Harry Booström ~ Screenprint alternative image
  • Harry Booström ~ Screenprint alternative image

Harry Booström (1917-1996)
Composition in Green and Red
1955
Screenprint (48/55)
Signed 'Booström -55' (pencil lower right)
Inscribed (in Swedish) 'To our friend Härman .....16.3-56'
13.5 x 18 ins / 34 x 46 cms

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Additional Information

Harry Sixten Booström was born in Guldrupe, Gotland on 15th December 1917. He was a Swedish artist.

Booström attended the private art school founded by the Swedish artist and designer Edward Berggren (1876-1961) and the Swedish Sculptor Gottfrid Larsson (1875–1947) between 1942 and 1945. This was then followed by a year with the Modenist painter Isaac Grünewald (1889-1946) at the school he founded in 1941. Booström’s study trips include Denmark (1946-47), Holland, Belgium and France (1948) and Tunisia (1949).

Booström first exhibited in 1946 at the annual ‘Unga Tecknare’ exhibition (organized by Gotland Art Association) at the National Museumin Stockholm. He exhibited again with this exhibition in 1948 and 1951.

In his 1948 review of the of ‘Unga Tecknare’ exhibition, Martin Strömberg wrote in the ‘Stockholms-Tidningen’ (Stockholm Newspaper) ‘The most radical of the group, is Harry Booström.... from a background of impressionistic landscape he has now arrived at a pure geometry - working with different colored squares in rhythmic decorative compositions’.

Booström exhibited with the Swedish artist and photographer Valentin Andersson (b.1922 at Galleri Samlaren in Stockholm (1948), was part of the traveling exhibition ‘Konst på papper’ (Art on Paper ) in 1950 and was one of the five Gotlanders at the The Youth Salon’s (De ungas salong) exhibition ‘5 Gotlänningar’ (5 Gotlanders) held in Stockholm in 1951.

By the mid 1950s, Booström had entirely moved away from abstract compositions in favour of purely non-figurative, konkretist / concretist, painting with geometric shapes.

As a member of the international ‘Groupe Espace’ (established in 1951 to form a link between artists and architects - see below), Booström worked with the architect Bertil Ahlqvist to produce the colour schemes for the terraced houses in Visby in the early 1960s

Booström is represented at the Museum of Modern Art (Moderna museet) in Stockholm, and the collection of (the king of Sweden 1950-1973) Gustaf VI Adolf (1882-1973). His public works include a mural on Norrbacka School in Visby.

Booström died in 1996, aged 78.

A major retrospective exhibition ‘Harry Booström - Avant-garde and Concretist’ was held at the Norrköping Art Museum in 2015.

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Groupe Espace

An association founded in Paris in 1951 by André Bloc and artists associated with his journal ‘Art d'aujourd'hui’. The members of the group included Jean Gorin, Edgard Pillet (1912-96), and Nicolas Schöffer. Their object was to promote the part of Constructivist doctrine that formed the subject of the last paragraph of Mondrian's essay ‘Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art’, namely that Constructivist art, united with architecture, should create a new environment appropriate to the new society that was to emerge in the modern age. They envisaged a ‘public art’, art as a social and collective - not an individual - phenomenon.