Ernst Billgren was born in Stockholm in 1957. From 1982 to 1987 he studied at the Valand College of Art in Gothenburg, where he later became a teacher. He started exhibiting in Sweden and abroad in 1985. Many of his works are now part of public collections, such as that of the Malmö Museum, the Gothenburg Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm and the Swedish Arts Council.

Ernst Billgren is one of Sweden's best known contemporary artists, recognized both for his artistic sense and impressive versatility. Indeed, he has produced paintings, drawings, and sculptures, besides writing theatre plays, film scripts and two novellas.

His artistic production, which makes use of a variety of media, reveals an ability to play with expressive languages that belong to both high and low culture. He creates provocative works in which the line between real and unreal is often blurred, with the intentional aim of destabilizing the onlooker.

His Neo-Baroque taste for allegories, numerous references to other works, and his use of contrast between classical and contemporary motifs make Billgren's work complex and intuitive, at once fabulous and obscure.Far from placing us in front of copies of reality, as was the case with Realism and Naturalism, Ernst Billgren's works present totally original products, meant to express a new concept of nature, in which foxes and squirrels are perfectly at ease in elegant middle-class living rooms, and where ducks and fish are seen as if the observer were underwater, and was seeing everything from a new perspective.

Source:
Berengo Fine Arts, www.berengo.com

Wilhelm von Kröckert is Ernst Billgren or the other way around. Wilhelm is Ernst Billgren’s middle name and Kröckert is his mother’s East Frisian maiden name and the name he held the first four years of his life.



Source:
http://www.larsbohmangallery.com/artists/wilhelm-von-krckert/bibliography

Ernst Billgren was born in Stockholm in 1957 and studied at Valandis Konsthögskola 1982 from 1982 to 1987. Billgren’s artistry is characterized by great diversity, which is unique in Swedish art life. He is a painter, graphic artist, sculptor and writer, debater and film and performing artist.

Billgren's artistic output spans a wide range of disciplines and includes everything from painting, sculpture, set design, and furniture design to fiction, film and music. In the various areas of activity, he finds a motivating continuity, which is recognizable in his investigations of natural painting, the national romantic, and the mythological. With great craftsmanship, Billgren works with various materials such as mosaics, wood, bronze, cement, tiles, and glass.

Characteristic of Ernst Billgren is his unnecessary way of putting common perceptions of what is good art on end. He mixes beauty painting with kitsch and lets animals and birds into the fine rooms as if there have never been any limits.