The Gallery on the Other Side - Bengt O Björklund

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Bengt O Björklund

Jöran Modéer

Ulf Lundkvist

Ulf Sandberg

The artist, journalist, photographer, writer, musician and editor Bengt O Björklund is born in Stockholm 1949. In 1968 he landed in jail in Istanbul for $ 20 worth of hash and met a bunch of international artists, poets and musicians. It was then he started his artistic career.

The source of his inspiration was his Japanese friend, the artist Koji Morrishita and the Italian artist, poet, and Dadaist Antonio Rasile. When Bengt came back to Sweden 1973 he made up his mind about painting and decide to be an artist and started to work real seriously. After a short trip through Europe he moved in to an old caretakers apartment with his own entrance at S:t Paulsgatan in 1974 at the south center of Stockholm, close to Mariatorget. He painted every day intensively for six months, always by night. the hours were long. It was not unusual that he sat by the easel for in stretches of twelve hours. He sat painting by the window and often there were people knocking on glass. Sometime the entered and bought a painting.
Light was important and it was the growing light in the paintings he made that kept him spellbound by the easel.

Towards the summer of 1974 Chris Atcherley, an old friend from his sojourn with Turkish jails, a British musician, turned up in a removal truck, a big Luton van, and wanted Bengt to join him and go to England and start a band. And so it happened. Bengt moved to Bolton to start a rock & roll band. There he also attended Bolton College of Art for a term. His paintings were left in safe keep in Copenhagen.
1975 Bengt was back in Copenhagen and met the American folksinger and gallery owner Joe Banks. Joe offered Bengt to exhibit his oil paintings at the gallery, which he did. That was his first public exhibition. One year later Det genombrutna fönstret – Breaking through the window, his first book of poetry, was published at Inferi. Inferi also had a paper that frequently published his accounts of his travels in Europe. Two years later Inferi published Nådsökarna – Seekers of grace, his second book of poetry.
1983, after living a few years up in north of Sweden touring with a rock and reggae band he moved to Brazil after having been invited by Beto Quadros. For one year he toured the state of Sao Paolo with the Brazilian band together with his American wife Rose.
1990 Bengt returned from Brazil to Sweden. He had during those years worked as a musician, a presenter of rock music on a radio station in São José dos Campos, baker, and English teacher. The last three years he run his own employment agency in one of Rio’s favelas together with Mara, Brazilian women he met in a bar in Copacabana.
1996, the same year he met his current wife Gertrude; he also met the American artist Harvey Tristan Cropper. That was the start of a new artistic era and at the same a continuation of the work he had started in the mid seventies.
Bengt has had many exhibitions since then in various galleries, churches, city administrative buildings and restaurants.

Bengt, Gertrude and Tuva at the Creative Kilometer of the Stockholm Water Festival.

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Publisher,
web manager
and gallery owner:
Bengt O Björklund
Lagavägen 24
12843 Bagarmossen
Tel: +46 8 39 32 80
info@andrasidan.nu

Webmaster:
Markus Hall