Gustavus Adolphus College

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Exhibitions at the Hillstrom Museum of Art

Today to January 29, 2010

Connected with Water (Paintings by Gudrun Westerlund) and Swedish-American Works from the Hillstrom Collection will be on view at the Hillstrom Museum of Art from Nov. 23, 2009 through Jan. 29, 2010. The Museum's regular hours are weekday, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and weekends, 1 to 5 p.m. Check the Museum website for limited hours during the semester break.

Artist Gudrun Westerlund was born in 1953 in Arjeplog, in Sweden, and now lives in Uppsala. The paintings in Connected with Water are all recent works in Westerlund's preferred medium of egg tempera. The works, which the artist calls a "poetical investigation," are related to and about the experience and meaning of water, especially as connected with the artist's childhood in northern Sweden. The paintings are done in an evocative style that is suggestive in imagery, and they have an intimate melding of form and color that draws much from Westerlund's Nordic heritage.

Connected with Water is presented with the support of a generous grant from the Swedish Council of America, whose mission is to support the promotion of "knowledge, understanding and appreciation of the Swedish heritage in American life and to strengthen contemporary cultural and educational ties between North America and Sweden." The exhibition is also supported with generous assistance from the Scandinavian Studies Program of Gustavus Adolphus College.

Concurrent with Connected with Water, the Museum is presenting a selection of Swedish-American Works from the Hillstrom Collection, including works by Dewey Albinson (1898-1971), B. J. O. Nordfeldt (1878-1955), John F. Carlson (1874-1945), Henry Mattson (1887-1971), Birger Sandzén (1871-1954), and Carl Sprinchorn (1887-1971). All of these artists were born in the last three decades of the nineteenth century, they each had prominent careers in the first half of the twentieth century, and, with one exception, they were all born in Sweden (Albinson's parents had emigrated before his birth in the U.S.).

The paintings and prints in the exhibit include recent donations of works by Albinson, given by Bob and Tucki Bellig and by John and Colles Larkin, and a recent acquisition of a woodblock print by Nordfeldt, purchased with funds committed by Dawn and Edward Michael. Also included are several works donated to the Museum by Reverend Richard L. Hillstrom, and two works that have been promised as future gifts and lent by him for this exhibit.