Bengt Lindström was born in 1925 in Storsjö Kapell in Sweden. He studied at the Isaac Grunewald School of Art, a student of Matisse, in Stockholm and at the Copenhagen School of Fine Arts (1944-1946), at the Art Institute of Chicago, in the workshops of Fernand Léger (1947) and André Lhotte in Paris. Bengt Lindström’s early canvases, portraits and self-portraits, are figurative.

Lindström’s first personal exhibition was organized in Stockholm in 1954. He was associated with Marfaing, Maryan and Pouget, later with Asger Jorn who influenced him. Lindström takes part in numerous group exhibitions in France and abroad. The artist’s style became more precise towards the end of the 1950s; He then uses large buckets of paint in pure colors and evolves around the canvas stretched out on a frame resting on the ground; the artist executes works with the same material, as if sculpting the painting.

In 1962 he participated in the second exhibition of the New Figuration held in Paris; two years later Lindström exhibited with the North-South group. For several years the painter created a gallery of portraits of writers and philosophers (Oscar Wilde, Gide, Claude Levi-Strauss). He paints landscapes inspired by his memories of the harsh nature of Northern Sweden, of characters from Scandinavian or Lapland mythology.

In the 80s he made small sculptures, ” Heads ” painted in papier-mâché, jewels. When he discovered in 1948 the engraved works of Chagall and the first “Popes” of Francis Bacon, Lindström made the first lithographs of him. Bengt Lindström invents a world of his own.

Since 1947 he lived and worked between France and Sweden. Lindström died in early 2008.