Seston and Day and Night

In the early 1960s, Rodhe was engaged in a monumental work for the Department of Ecology and Genetics at Uppsala University. He based it on the researchers’ material – aquatic life forms in the samples they studied – as in Plankton, water under a microscope, from 1962. Countless drawings and watercolours were made, organisms, particles and seston were examined under the microscope, but the artist also made freer compositional studies to capture the multitude of life forms. (Seston, 1962). The collection includes a large body of this material from 1961-1963, much of it titled Seston, which also became the title of the monumental work in Uppsala. Another prestigious commission was Day and Night for the newspaper Dagens Nyheter’s building in Stockholm. This project lasted from 1963 to 1967 and resulted in experiments exploring the newspaper theme and the fading world of newspaper culture – the Klara district in Stockholm – but also composition itself. The newspaper motif as such invited a style based on collage, where fragments of image and text, and newspaper ink on white paper inspired elaborations with positive and negative shapes, and with light and darkness. Rodhe examined this potential in countless smaller paintings and drawings, such as the ink drawing Untitled study for Day and Night, (1964) and the painting Newspaper Triptych (1964). Marabouparken in Stockholm has a work that is closely related to Day and Night, Signs of the City (1970), also in glazed stoneware.