With this "second deal" out of Fredrik Roos' large collection of contemporary Scandinavian art, we hope to give not only a more extensive picture of the collection, but also a picture of the Scandinavian 80's that gave birth to it.
The tension between romantic longing and cool distance was one of the most lasting impressions already in 1953, the first exhibition of selected works from the Roos Collection. A tension which is intensified in this second exhibition with the works by twelve artists.

On the one hand, we are confronted with Olav Christopher Jenssen's and Jukka and Marika Mäkelä's unreserved Scandinavian Romanticism. Fanciful painting, paradoxically deeply rooted in tradition, while searching for the point where painting and nature become one. A search for the authentic.
On the other hand, Ernst Billgren's and Martin Wickström's irony deeply rooted in ideals of the Swedish Welfare State, where the Kitsch meets Lassie and Disney. Or the media-poisoned, critically distanced worlds of painting according to Lars Nilsson, Stig Sjölund and Ingrid Orfali.

Though they seem to be essentially different, it is possible that these two attitudes may spring from the same source: The life in an ex-farming society, that with astonishing speed has been transformed into one of the world's most advanced post-industrial societies, where nature has increasingly become something Man only encounters in a cultivated, organised and mediated form.

One is faced with the decision to either, like Stig Sjölund, whole-heartedly embrace Progress and declare that "nature is best appreciated through the window of a car"; or like Jukka Mäkelä, to fight passionately to preserve and nurture the sense of presence, which is threatened by the bustle of the media...