Lennart Aschenbrenner has often been seen - and rightly so - as the painter of beautifully scumbled surfaces, a color sybarite with an eye for what lies hidden in a dead angle, for the blindingly humdrum and insignificant thing - qualities which have assured him a given position in Swedish contemporary art.

Now, when Rooseum shows paintings from three decades by Aschenbrenner - incidentally, our first one man show - there might be other aspects in his work that will attract attention.

One is, without doubt, the strong sense of contemporaneity emanating from the works. It is hard to imagine other artists from Sweden in the 1960's giving such a strong impression that culture - not least the pop- and consumtion culture - could be looked upon with such fresh eyes. His paintings can look like impudent signals from the street or the gutter: a torn candy bar paper, a portrait of a zeebra crossing. . .

If culture functions as a kind of nature in the works of Lennart Aschenbrenner from the 60's and 70's, one can say that the relationship is the reversed in the decade of an awakening ecological conscience: the 80's. These often green shimmering paintings produce a picture of nature that cannot be separated from culture, where every branch is a sign, every shadow painting.

The exhibition consists of 70 paintings and a number of sculptures and prints. In the gigantic main gallery of Rooseum, Lennart Aschenbrenner has done a painting directly on the wall, a work which only exists during the exhibition, and will be removed afterwards: the 56 square meter painting I Slottsträdgården (In the Palace Garden).

Lennart Aschenbrenner was born in 1943 in Perstorp. He lives in Ynglingarum and Stockholm. He got his education at Skånska Målarskolan in Malmö 1960-61, with R. Askou-Jensen in Copenhagen 1962, and at the Royal Art Academy in Stockholm 1962-68.