Oil painting by Carsten Regild

Oil painting on canvas by Carsten Regild. Signed by the artist and dated 1961.

Carsten Regild (1941-1992) was a Swedish painter known for his playful collages and abstract art. Before devoting his time to his artistic production, Regild had worked in the advertising industry. A sense of his earlier career can be felt in his later artistic output – bold images are placed in conjunction with letters, words, and phrases, fostering multi-layered pieces that communicate directly with the onlooker.

His art has been the subject of several solo exhibitions, including ‘Nekropolis’ at the Modern Museum in Stockholm (1981), ‘Terra Incognita Tur o Retur’ (1990) at Kulturhuset, and a 2006 retrospective at Stockholm’s Art Academy. His work is currently represented in the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, and in municipal art museums in Norrköping and Kalmar.

The relationship between word and image in his art is unsurprising given his role in founding the stencil magazine Kulturmagsinet Vargen in 1973 with writer and director Rolf Börjlind, with whom he would later establish art publishing house Vargens Förlag. Often described as having a foot in both the pop art and in the Dadaist/surrealist traditions, Regild utilised tropes from both to articulate his vision of modernity in the latter part of the twentieth century.

This piece, then, presents an opportunity to own a unique, experimental piece of art by Regild. It echoes the early twentieth-century emergence of Cubist art whilst maintaining the same layering effect that Regild’s collages play with by layered sections of blue pieced together.