1953 - the year of Stalin's death and Dag Hammarskjöld's appointment to the chair of the United Nations. 1953 is also the year of birth of a Swedish generation of artists.

As far as sport is concerned we talk about the generation of 1956. That year produced a number of Swedish sportsmen like Ingemar Stenmark, Björn Borg and Frank Andersson who a couple of decades later were to become world champions in their chosen fields. In art the magic year is 1953. A year in which a great number of artists such as Max Book, Rolf Hanson, Fredrik Wretman, Håkan Rehnberg, Johan Scott, Eva Löfdahl, Ann Edholm and Anders Widoff, that came to dominate the Swedish art-scene in the 1980s, were born.

The contemporary integrity and boldness came to be the hallmark of these artists. This was a generation that against all odds decided to become artists during the art-hostile and thoroughly politicized decade of the 1970s, and who made their debut in the early 1980s. Perhaps the explanation for the surprising domination of this generation of artists is to be found in such factors as their strong sense of dedication, the reception they received and the growth of the artistic and economic climate in the years that followed.

The generation of 1953 was the first generation to grow up with the influences of the new media, not the least television. This influence is very noticeable in their works. Even though a strong sense of tradition of Swedish lanscape-painting is present in the works of, among others, Rolf Hanson and Max Book, it is the distant echo of the world as filtered through television rather than romantic open-air painting.

The artists born in 1953 constitute the core of the Fredrik Roos Nordic Collection, that through the agency of Lillemor and Axel Roos and Statens Konstmuseer has been brought to the Rooseum. The works of these eight artists constitute a fifth of the entire collection of 500 works (paintings and sculptures) by 83 Scandinavian artists. The collection consists of works by three generations: A smaller group of older artists like Evert Lundqvist, Lennart Rodhe and Philip von Shantz. A very influential middle generation is represented by for instance Ola Billgren, Dick Bengtsson, Jan Håfström, P G Thelander and Lennart Aschenbrenner and, lastly, a large group of artists born in the 1950s. The three generations are connected by the teacher/ pupil relationship. The older generation serving as source of inspiration to the younger one.

It is no exaggeration in saying that Fredrik Roos Nordic Collection is a unique document of Scandinavian art. There is no other collection of Scandinavian art from the last two decades to match the one created by Fredrik Roos - neither in quantity, nor in quality.