Olle Bærtling

Olle Bærtling (6 December 1911, Halmstad – 2 May 1981, Stockholm) arrived at painting by an unlikely route. For much of his early adult life he worked as a currency trader at Skandinaviska Banken, and it was not until 1948 that he travelled to Paris to study with Fernand Léger and André Lhote. That immersion proved decisive. By 1950 he was exhibiting geometric abstract paintings at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, marking his full commitment to abstraction and his entry into the Parisian avant-garde. Two years later he had developed the visual language that would define his entire subsequent output: sharply bounded triangular colour fields that press against — and seem to burst beyond — the edges of the canvas, held in tension by black lines and saturated hues. He left the bank in 1956 to paint full time.

The open-form principle that animates Bærtling's paintings also found expression in three dimensions. From the 1950s through the 1970s he produced sculptural works that carry the same logic of spatial dynamism into physical space, aligning him with the broader international movement of concrete and constructive art. His relationship with Galerie Denise René in Paris, which began with his first showing there in 1952 and deepened into regular representation from 1954, placed him squarely within the European geometric abstraction milieu. In 1963 he received the Prize of Honor at the 7th Biennial of São Paulo, an international recognition of his standing. Galerie Nordenhake, which gave him his first solo exhibition in 1976, remains his primary gallery today, with locations in Stockholm, Berlin, and Mexico City.

The scope of institutional interest in Bærtling's work is considerable. His paintings and sculptures are held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Guggenheim Museum, Tate in London, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. A large retrospective shared between Moderna Museet and Malmö Konsthall took place in 1981, the year of his death, and in 2008 the Chinati Foundation in Marfa devoted a solo institutional exhibition to his paintings from 1952 to 1980. Galerie Nordenhake presented a focused survey of his painting and sculpture from 1951 to 1980 in 2015, and a solo exhibition titled Olle Bærtling à Paris was mounted at CFHILL in Stockholm in 2024. Activity around his legacy has continued to grow: 2026 has brought both Formes ouvertes – Olle Bærtling at the Institut suédois in Paris and Tensions and Colours – Around Olle Bærtling at Galerie Lahumière, while Galerie Nordenhake's fiftieth-anniversary group exhibition featured Ksard (1980), his last known painting. Frieze published a feature on the artist in 2025. The Olle Bærtling Foundation, which maintains documentation of more than three hundred works spanning his career, continues to steward and promote his legacy.