Lena Cronqvist was born in Karlstad, in Sweden, in 1938. From 1959 to 1964, she attended the Royal University Collage of Fine Arts in Stockholm. From 1958 to 1959, she studied at the National College of Arts, Crafts and Design of Stockholm. She currently lives and works in Sweden where she is also a member of the Royal Academy of Art.

At the end of the 1970s in Sweden, as in many other countries, the nature of painting was being seriously debated. Artists wanted to break with tradition; they preferred to apply new expressive and much more contemporary means to painting. Moreover, the themes which urgently felt the needed to be faced, even through art, were linked to daily life, politics...