Johanna Atlegrim, Swedish Illustrator, Dies in Brussels Attacks

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/30/international-home/johanna-atlegrim-swedish-illustrator-dies-in-brussels-attacks.html

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Johanna Atlegrim’s illustrations were full of color, bold lines and playful figures.

A Swedish illustrator living in Brussels, Ms. Atlegrim, who also used the first name My, recently created the artwork for the cover of the seventh issue of Cuistax, a children’s magazine. A cat, a white bird and two mysterious creatures appear amid a sea of blue, green and yellow.

The issue, “Illustre,” is featured in an exhibition at the Centre de Gravure et de l’Image Imprimée, a museum in La Louvière, Belgium, that is devoted to works on paper, and Ms. Atlegrim, 30, worked on the show. A party to celebrate the issue was scheduled for March 23, but it has been canceled.

Along with Cuistax, Ms. Atlegrim also did illustrations for the Belgian publications Alphabeta Magazine and 24h01.

After the attacks in Brussels on March 22, Ms. Atlegrim’s friends circulated fliers reporting her as missing. On Saturday evening, the authorities confirmed that she had died in the attack on the Maelbeek subway station, according to her mother, Marika.

Kurt Snoekx, an editor at Agenda magazine in Brussels, which published an article about Ms. Atlegrim in 2013, described her as “someone who created beauty in such a refreshing, natural way, but wanted it to have something to tell as well.”

On his Facebook page, Mr. Snoekx wrote that Ms. Atlegrim “set herself the beautiful goal of reaching out to people, children in particular, telling them they could do whatever their hearts desired to do, sharing what she knew and felt to help them on their way.”

Born on April 27, 1985, Ms. Atlegrim described the breadth of her work on what a collaborator said was her Tumblr account: editorial illustrations, drawings, paintings and even weaving, which she began studying in 2011.

On her personal website, she described drawing as a “daily ritual.”

“I draw to structure my images and explore the limits between the flatness of the paper and the plasticity of color and shape,” she wrote. “But it also goes beyond simple planning of an image.”