There is a feeling of reverence and awe in the newly-opened Björn Lövin Gallery in Avesta Art. Stately, stylish and dignified stands Dädsker. At first glance the sculptures seem to support the slag-stone wall while in actual fact they give their support to each one of us – to human dignity. The name Dädsk stands for the Swedish ‘Det är du som kan!’, “You can do it”. The sculptures carry the characteristic mark of Björn Lövin. The sanctity of the individual and, at the same time, their participation in a fellowship, a community, is a basic principle for his artistic work. In the centre of the gallery is the car Full fart framåt (Full Speed Ahead), from 1988 at an exhibition in Kulturhuset in Stockholm. Here the artist adopted the role of anthropologist and explored, in an imaginary future, the debris from the 20th century consumer society. The sports car is easy to identify on one plane. At the same time its material and simplicity link it to excavations of cultures remote from Western society’s love of the motor car. The vivid painting from 1995 Vid floden, (By the River), stretches beyond time and space. Björn Lövin was one of the greatest artists of our time. He participated in the introduction of installations in Sweden with shocking exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and Kulturhuset in Stockholm. That he was widely appreciated internationally is hardly known in
Sweden. In 1981 he took the prestigious Pompidou Centre in Paris by storm with a gigantic exhibition which also included a completely novel phenomenon, video art. The headlines in Le Monde showed great respect for Lövin’s work, a confirmation that greatly impressed his French hosts. When the UN held a major environmental conference in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, twenty of the world’s leading sculptors and painters were invited to participate with their works. Björn Lövin was among those who represented Europe with his enormous sculpture Kulturmotor, (Culture Motor), a cassava press made of hardwoods from the Amazon forests. The artist Björn Lövin passed away in 2009. He was born in Falun in 1937 and as a young man studied in Barcelona and at Stockholm and Uppsala universities. He lived in Dicka near Avesta, in Stockholm and in his last years in the village of Folkärna. Björn Lövin took part in Avesta Art in 1997 and followed all the Avesta Art exhibitions with a critical eye. Only three artists have their own room at the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm – Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol and Björn Lövin. Thanks to the kind donations of his daughters, Avesta Art now has its own Björn Lövin Gallery.
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