ArtistSwedish
Anders Österlin
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In postwar Malmö, a small group of artists decided that Swedish art had grown too provincial. Anders Österlin was the youngest of them - barely nineteen - when he joined C.O. Hultén and Max Walter Svanberg in founding Imaginisterna in 1945. The group threw open what contemporaries called a south Swedish window to the world, forging direct links with the Cobra movement and its key figures: Appel, Corneille, Asger Jorn, and Constant. Österlin had received virtually no formal training, just a night course at Malmö's technical vocational school, yet his early paintings showed a confident sign-like visual language built from birds, women's heads, plants, towers, and wheels - images deliberately ambiguous, hovering between figuration and symbol.
By the mid-1950s Österlin had moved decisively into non-figurative territory, and his reputation crossed into applied art as well as fine art. Together with designer John Melin, under the duo signature M&Ö - nicknamed "anden och handen" (the spirit and the hand) - he produced some of the most distinctive graphic work in Scandinavian postwar design. Their catalogs and posters for Moderna Museet in the 1960s helped define the museum's visual identity and remain collected in their own right. MoMA holds examples of their 1965 Moderna Museet collaboration.
Österlin's public art ambitions surfaced in 1956 when he and Signe Persson-Melin won the competition to decorate a wall at the new T-Centralen station in Stockholm. The proposal was executed the following year in ceramic tiles, giving commuters a daily encounter with his formal vocabulary. His connection to the Swedish Telegraph Bureau in Malmö, where he worked for fifteen years as an advertising artist, ran in parallel with his studio practice throughout this period.
His paintings, prints, and graphic works entered major institutional collections including Moderna Museet and Nationalmuseum. In 2007, Malmö awarded him the city's cultural prize - 80,000 kronor and a silver sculpture - in recognition of a career that had quietly shaped the visual culture of the region from its postwar margins. He died in Limhamns parish, Malmö, on 20 October 2011, aged 85.
At auction, Österlin's work appears primarily through Swedish regional houses. Garpenhus Auktioner and Limhamns Auktionsbyrå account for the largest share of the 23 items tracked on Auctionist, with Bukowskis Malmö also representing him. Works on paper and prints - serigraphs and color lithographs - make up the majority of lots, typically selling in the 350-600 SEK range. A signed composition titled "Tecken i landskap" achieved 14,000 DKK, the strongest result in the current dataset.