Karl Torsten Renqvist, born 10 May 1924 in Ludvika parish in Kopparberg county, died 13 May 2007 in Kummelnäs in Nacka, was a Swedish sculptor, graphic artist, painter, author and art educator.

After graduating from high school in 1945, he pursued preparatory geological studies, which he interrupted at an early stage to train as an artist. Renqvist studied for a short time at Otte Sköld's Painting School in Stockholm before being able to study with Aksel Jørgensen at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen from 1946–1948. He then continued his studies with Sven Erixson at the Stockholm Academy of Fine Arts from 1948–1950 and during study trips to the Netherlands, Germany, Paris and London where he stayed from 1951–1952 as a British Council scholarship holder.

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He debuted with an exhibition at the Lilla galleriet while he was still a student at the Stockholm Academy of Fine Arts in 1950. With a follow-up exhibition the following year, he was hailed by critics as a “neo-expressionist”. His pictures showed a concise, expressive painting with everyday objects as motifs: coffee pot, household roll, knitted sock, nails. He was drawn to unseen or then overlooked things in art; an everyday mysticism with a strong charge. In the middle of the decade, a reorientation took place, among other things, he burned around 80 paintings in 1954. During annual trips to more or less arctic regions – Swedish and Finnish Lapland, Lofoten, Iceland, Spitsbergen – Torsten Renqvist developed an original landscape painting in which what was seen is expressed in symbiosis with conceptual ideas. However, his painting also moved towards increasing abstraction.

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In the painting of the sixties, the tone became darker, objects returned as motifs – often fragments, pieces of bone, inorganic and organic forms – and were given an increasingly profound symbolism. His last major painting, “Iconostasis of Feathers and a Newspaper”, was a picture of time, a painting of mourning, a picture of power, depicted in a footprint, trampling on the weak.” (Beate Sydhoff).

He participated in the National Museum's exhibition Young Artists 1950–1952, Young Graphics at Kulturen in Lund and the Nordic Graphic Union's exhibition in Copenhagen. He participated with the painting Three Things and a Feather in the Carnegie Institute's exhibition in Pittsburgh and he was represented in the exhibition Junge schwedische Kunst in Stuttgart and in the exhibition La peinture nordique contemporaine in Paris. As a specially invited guest exhibitor, he participated in the Swedish General Art Association's exhibition at Liljevalchs konsthall in 1957.

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In addition to his own work, he was active as a teacher at Valand's painting school from 1955–1958. Torsten Renqvist himself speaks of his daytime side (painting during the summer months) and his nighttime side (graphics at home in the studio during the winter months). While human subjects are conspicuous by their absence in his paintings, they appear abundantly in his drawings and graphics. Here you can also find animal images among which one would have liked to see a cheerfully strolling hedgehog with all its thorns out as an indirect self-portrait. One side of his innovative graphics emphasizes the play of lines, the “calligraphic” side. After the revolt in Hungary in 1956, Renqvist made a notable series of pictures based on newspaper photos, “Upplopp”. At the Venice Biennale in 1964, he was awarded a prize for his graphics.

The year 1967 marked a new abrupt break and a new start in Torsten Renqvist's artistic career. He completely abandoned painting for sculpture. In sculpture, both his "day side" and his "night side" are expressed. At first, he worked in sheet iron. He made small scenes, for example "Victory", a group of men drunk on victory and crouching. Nike, the goddess of victory, was a motif he returned to several times. When victory is won, Nike is elsewhere, he meant with a pathos characteristic of his anti-heroic humanism: "Victory has a dirty shine".

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Torsten Renqvist soon found his material as a sculptor: wood. Inspired by Polish folk art, medieval sculpture, sculpture from ancient Crete and Egypt as well as from newspaper photos and children's drawings, he created everything from conceptual images and depictions of mythical and moral situations to playful animal sculptures for children. Many of the sculptures were then cast in bronze. Together with the plasterer Domenico Inganni and the sculptors Mats Åberg and Evert Lindfors, Torsten Renqvist made many of these casts at home in his studio in Kummelnäs outside Stockholm.

In his youth, Torsten Renqvist wanted to become a writer and he remained a writer. Excerpts from his diaries are published in Brottstycken (1988) and Flisor (1994). He participated in the art debate with weighty contributions. But above all, he often provided his sculptures with written comments, small compressed texts that circle the motifs without explaining them.

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It has been said of Gunnar Ekelöf that he achieved his central position through constant movements in the periphery. The paradox could also apply to the outsider Torsten Renqvist. His painting and graphics and later sculpture have been central to contemporary Swedish art. “Torsten Renqvist was one of the truly great Swedish artists of the last century” (Ulf Linde). But since his debut, his work has consistently been perceived as a vital and idiosyncratic alternative to contemporary trends. Renqvist is represented at, among others, the Gothenburg Art Museum and the National Museum, the Modern Museum in Stockholm, the Norrköping Art Museum, the Kalmar Art Museum, the Malmö Museum, Örebro County Council and the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen.

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