Rita Lundqvist: New Oil Paintings at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in Chelsea presents new work by the Swedish painter Rita Lundqvist from November 5 to December 18, 2026. It is her fourth exhibition with the gallery and the first in nearly a decade. The show centers on a group of new oil paintings on panel.

Lundqvist was born in Hässleholm, Sweden, in 1953 and lives and works in Stockholm. She studied at the Royal University College of Fine Arts in Stockholm from 1980 to 1985 and was elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in 2000. In 2011 she received the Barbro & Holger Bäckström Art Scholarship, one of the largest grants in Sweden, and that fall had a solo show at Malmö Konsthall. Other solo presentations include Liljevalchs Konsthall in Stockholm (2010) and Norrköpings Konstmuseum (1999). Her work appeared in the Carnegie Art Award's Nordic Painting, a traveling exhibition that opened at Arken Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen in 2001, and in the Edstrand Foundation Art Prize exhibition at the former Rooseum, now Moderna Museet Malmö, in 2000. Her paintings belong to the collections of Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Borås Konstmuseum, Göteborgs Konstmuseum and Malmö Konstmuseum, among others.

The new paintings are small in scale and quiet in mood. Each shows a single figure or a pair in what looks like a spiritual or ritual setting, and the scenes allow several readings. Forms are flattened, and the palette stays within muted greys, indigos, pale yellows and ochres. Composition and color carry the work.

Balance runs through the series. Two men stand on either side of a row of saplings, one holding a shovel and the other an ax. Two women stand side by side, one loosely holding a flower and the other empty-handed, both looking at a blossom lying at their feet. Among the solitary figures, one merges with a line of evenly spaced stones, and another is joined by two birds. The plain structure of these scenes recalls the moral of a fable.

Every composition is divided by a stark horizon line between foreground and background. It can be read as the split between sky and earth, or heaven and hell, or as the edge of a stage set that separates reality from fiction. The surrealist, folk-inflected figures can be taken one by one, and also as parts of a single austere pictorial world.