Sigfrid Billgren was born in Gothenburg in 1990 but has lived in Stockholm since 1996.
Billgren is a versatile self-taught artist and creator working in a variety of creative disciplines. He started his career as a designer of furniture and domestic objects. He soon began to act as a curator, arranging exhibitions of art and design.
Having grown up in one of Sweden’s best-known artistic families, surrounded by art right from the start, Sigfrid Billgren long resisted taking the plunge as a practising visual artist.
As an artist and painter, he initially focused on colour – the way in which colours relate to each other. He finds inspiration in non-figurative geometrical painting as it developed internationally during the late forties and fifties. The Swedish master abstract painter Olle Bærtling (1911-1981), with his striking variant of the movement that was known in Sweden as “concretism” or Concrete Art is one of several models from this period. Sigfrid Billgren has developed a personal, up-dated version of this strict geometric painting with its own, playful attack in colour and form that, at times, is reminiscent of pop art and comic strips.
Abstract geometrical colour-field painting of the sort that Sigfrid Billgren embraces can seem simple, but it depends on precision, balance and meticulous preparation. He has explained that he prepares his paintings, which he creates using acrylic paints, with something in the region of one hundred sketches. He begins with a single colour and then continues adding colour until he achieves the desired result.