Åke Göransson

Åke Göransson (1902–1942) had a short but intense career as a painter—only a dozen years, from the early 1920s to the early 1930s, when his mental health deteriorated rapidly. Fame came in the early 1940s, but by then Göransson was already too ill to recognize his own paintings. They had been stashed under his mother’s sofa for more than a decade when they were discovered and exhibited first in Stockholm at Galleriet för modern konst i hemmiljö (Gallery of Modern Art in the Home) in 1941, and at the Gothenburg Art Gallery in 1942. His early pictures have a subtle use of colour, but in the later paintings the colours are intensified to disturbing levels. Per Dahlström