Holger Bäckström

Holger Bäckström was born in 1939 in Lund and studied at Konstfack, the University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm from 1960 to 1964 before returning to Lund, where he began developing three-dimensional paintings and kinetic reliefs that evolved from his work in sculpture, translating spatial concerns into pictorial form and producing surfaces noted for their luminous color, rapid brushwork, and sense of motion. In 1964 he co-founded an initiative in Malmö that allowed the public to borrow works by younger artists and that became a central venue for the city’s emerging art scene. He expanded his practice beyond painting and relief, developing a text-based exchange with the gallerist Anders Tornberg that was later published as The World’s Most Beautiful ABC. He took part in Multikonst, a nationwide project that introduced contemporary art to broad audiences across Sweden, and in the years that followed he pursued modular systems like the interactive Felix Plate, designed so that its reversible elements could generate countless variations. 

In 1965 he formed a lifelong collaboration with his childhood friend Bo Ljungberg under the name Beck & Jung, producing variable paintings, sculptural objects, computer-generated graphics, and large-scale public commissions. Their exploration of computers began in 1966 with images composed from the standard character set of line printers at IBM in Malmö. In 1968 they created the Felixsnurran, a variable silkscreen system with billions of possible combinations, followed in 1969 by the Girocubes, aluminum objects made in 700 copies. That same year they developed the Picture Alphabet, a set of eleven geometric forms used to generate an unlimited range of images. At Lund University’s data center they advanced this work in the early 1970s, first with black-and-white plotter drawings and, from 1973, with color images produced on an experimental Color Ink Jet Plotter, one of the first of its kind. This technology supported series including Chromo Cube, Tebtunis, Dragon, and Dendra. During these years they also began executing major public commissions, among them Hej patient! for Huddinge Hospital in 1972–73, an installation of fire-lacquered aluminum panels based on the Picture Alphabet, with sketches preserved at Skissernas Museum. By the end of the decade they had completed more than fifty projects in public space, including Cubes in Transformation in Linero and the decoration of Klippan District Court. In the 1980s they expanded these systems in collaboration with researchers at Lund University, producing Chromo Cubes to map color in three dimensions, and began using Macs and a Canon CLC 800 color laser printer to create series such as Shoowa, Mini Flag, Color Operator, Signal, and Dendrabanan. By the 1990s their computer prints combined vivid color and precision with the permanence of traditional graphic techniques, establishing fully durable digital works within their practice.

They held their first solo exhibition at Lunds Konsthall in 1967. Their early computer-generated color works were shown at the Paris Youth Biennale in 1973, followed by international attention throughout the 1970s and 1980s with solo exhibitions in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Basel, Copenhagen, and Milwaukee. In Sweden they became active in the public sphere with over fifty commissions, while continuing to present their work in galleries and museums. In 1972 they received the cultural scholarship of the Municipality of Lund. Their Chromo Cubes project was exhibited at Pratt Institute in New York in 1981, and by the mid-1990s they had completed major decorations for institutions including Klippan District Court and Studentlitteratur in Lund. Their last joint exhibition was Computerkunst at the Museum der Stadt Gladbeck in Germany in 1997. Bäckström passed away later that year, and in 2012 Galleri Mårtenson & Persson in Stockholm presented a retrospective of Beck & Jung’s work under the title The Pioneers of Computer Art.