Biography

Born in Stockholm in 1949, Ulf Greder is self-taught as a painter, participating in his first exhibition while still under twenty at Liljevach's celebrated spring salon. He has held numerous exhibitions in Stockholm as well as other Swedish cities, most recently in Gothenburg. Since the early 1970s, Ulf Greder has been largely resident in Britain, aside from periods spent in New York and India, and frequent visits to France. He has been represented by Francis Kyle Gallery for twenty-one years, showing first in the Gallery's theme exhibition, We Must Always Turn South…which introduced his taste for Mediterranean subject matter to English collectors. He held his first American exhibition in San Francisco in 1990 and in 1993 showed in The Hague, Holland. One-man exhibitions with Francis Kyle Gallery in 1991, 1993, 1994, 1996, 2000 and 2003.

Ulf Greder

The Swedish painter Ulf Greder's compositions in his inimitable and eccentric manner are a celebration of social life, executed in Greder's innovative chantourné (cut-out) technique which he has been developing in recent years to new heights of craft and ingenuity.

In the perspective of Swedish art today, Ulf Greder's roots can be traced back to a well-established tradition of figurative painting in his country which caught on in the early twentieth century. It came as a vigorous, home-grown riposte to ideas and approaches brought back from Paris by a generation of young Swedes who had studied there under painters like Matisse. For the painters of the mother country, everyday life remained the only subject, to be treated in an appropriate (some would say naïve) manner. Painters such as Hilding Lindqvist, Eric Hallström, Bror Hjort and Olle Olsson considered their priority was to interpret ways of life fast disappearing from a Sweden anxious at all costs to embrace Modernism.

For Greder it has been France, paradoxically, where changing lifestyles have been posing a threat, and it has been his chief pursuit to define and defend against all comers what he interprets as the French way of life. This revolves for him uncompromisingly around a perception of douceur de vivre (not quite det lyckiga livet) as it finds expression in an indulgence in life's simpler pleasures, evoked typically with a light, gently humorous touch and a taste for bold and vivid colours.

Mostly, though not exclusively, the inhabitants of Greder's chantourné paintings live in an agreeable Mediterranean climate where, usually out of doors, they gather to eat and drink among family and friends, to engage in not too strenuous boating and other sporting activities or simply to pass time as natural flâneurs, savouring the pleasure of doing not very much at all with great gusto. It seems only fitting that in evoking this largely innocent world, much anatomised in the cinema of Eric Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard and perhaps specially Jacques Tati, Ulf Greder has chosen (as he puts it) to 'liberate' his subjects from their frames, all the better to imagine himself (and ourselves the viewers) participating in these intimate and appealing situations and settings.

In its directness and simplicity Ulf Greder's work leaves no room for imprecision in the treatment of practical matters such as boating, a subject where the artist has drawn much on his own formidable experience. Just such an hands-on approach, so appropriate to a culture which takes pride in its material, practical achievements, characterises Greder's newest subject, the canals of Delft and Amsterdam and the shoreline of the Zuider Zee.

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