Thea Ekström : dissonance, harmony, surrealism

This is the first major research publication on the life and work of the Swedish artist Thea Ekström. Through newspaper clippings, letters, diary entries and close reading of artworks, art historian Linda Fagerström guides the reader through Thea Ekström extensive oeuvre and varied life. Thea Ekström (1920-1988) grew up in Söndrum outside Halmstad but soon moved to Stockholm to study music. She was a singer and supported herself for a long time as a touring pianist. It wasn't until a period of convalescence in the 1950s that she took up painting seriously and quickly developed a very distinctive style. Her early imagery was influenced by surrealism, but the work soon became more abstract, as she filled her drawings and paintings with idiosyncratic signs and symbols that recur in diffrent guises. Her breakthrough as an artist came in 1960s with exhibitions in Paris and New York. In the following decades she showed regulary in USA, France, and Germany, as well as in Sweden. In many ways, Thea Ekström is a typical representive of the European generation that grew up during the Nazi rise to power and lived through the horrors of the following world war, only to experience the post-war period economic boom of the 1950s and the social, cultural, and emotional upheavals of the 1960s. Her artistic expression, however, is atypical and specific. It cannot be mistaken for anyone else's.