Ung pojke (Young Boy)

In Swedish art history, the 1950s are often associated with abstraction and an art movement called concretism, in which the interplay between colour and form was considered more important than art’s representation of the real world. The abstract 1950s have left their mark throughout Stadsparken, including in Arne Jones’s fountain sculpture Resonans (Resonance), which was installed as a sculptural headliner at the park’s main entrance in 1958.

But far from all art from this time period was modernistically abstract. The same year that Resonance was purchased, the city also acquired the smaller bronze sculpture Young Boy by Lennart Kjellström, which was placed a bit further into the park. This sculpture is a highly figurative nude and depicts a boy framed by some sort of giant fern.

Kjellström seems almost to have wanted to present his subject as timeless and eternal. Depicting people in the nude has been a way for many artists to detach their motifs from everyday contemporary life. Without the time-typical clothing fashions that anchor the figures to a certain point in time, they can instead be associated with antique nudes and what is considered to be the eternal values of the fine arts.

In this case, the sculpture has also placed the boy next to a fern, a plant that has existed for about 400 million years – long before us humans and our own calculations of time. At the same time, the boy, with his caveat countenance, is typical of the Swedish post-war confidence in the future and an ideal for children of the 1950s to be measured against. Is it perhaps the future that he is looking towards?