Ulf Greder

Glimpses of French life come from the wine district of St Chinian in the Montpellier region, where Greder regularly spends winter. Spring – punctuated inevitably by visits to the Marais district of Paris – is heralded in the village by the Fête du Mimosa. Then a new coast beckons with a season, half on water half on land, in Brittany with its endless confusion of headlands and indented estuaries, its reefs and dramatic rockscapes and in 2008 specially the four-yearly Brest Maritime Festival where working boats, yachts and traditional sailing craft meet.

It may be something of a paradox but perhaps not inappropriate that a Swedish painter finding his subject matter largely in France should be indebted in his technique to the inventiveness of a Flemish painter from another age who worked at his best in Denmark. Cornelius Gijsbrechts is credited as the painter who transformed chantourné – or ‘cut-out’ – in his miraculous trompe l’oeil still lifes painted for the Danish court. Soon after, painters and stage designers of the Baroque exploited on the grandest scale cut-out devices which gave a new dimension to the realm of fantasy and illusion. For Greder, on the other hand, liberating his paintings from their frames and allowing his subjects to expand freely beyond this conventional constriction has worked in the opposite direction. Bridging the gap between viewer and subject, chantourné as Greder has perfected it enables the artist to become as one with the congenial Gallic world he covets; dining alfresco, exploring Nice’s Marché aux Puces, absorbed into an infectiously carefree social ambience where never a solitary figure is to be seen.

It could be said, indeed, that for Greder the enduring appeal of la France profonde has a parallel and precedent in the work of his earlier compatriot Anders Zorn, who backed away from international success to portray his own country roots; for Mora Fair (Mora Marknad), read Greder’s Fête du Mimosa. There is little doubt, however, that Eric Rohmer’s flirting couples or Jacques Tati’s more formal holiday makers so cherished by Greder as they savour innocent pleasures in a France now hardly surviving, would be much discomfited were they to stray into the lost summer of Bergman’s Wild Strawberries. Douceur de vivre is not to be confused with det lyckiga livet. ‘When French people are unhappy,’ observed Gertrude Stein, ‘that is when they are not occupied completely occupied with the business of living which is a normal occupation their enormously occupying occupation and when for one reason or another that is not occupying them they naturally immediately talk about revolution.’

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. 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, his principle source of inspiration. 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, 2003, 2006 and 2009.

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