ArtistSwedish
Axel Kleimer
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Growing up between winters in Kristianstad and summers at the family property in Hammarslund, Axel Bernhard Kleimer developed an early attachment to the flat, expansive light of Skåne that would define his output for four decades. After completing his schooling with distinction in 1901 and fulfilling military service in Landskrona, he was admitted to the Royal Institute of Fine Arts in Stockholm, graduating in 1906. During those years he formed friendships with fellow students Hugo Carlberg, John Bauer, and Ester Almqvist, connections that shaped his professional outlook even as his aesthetic commitments diverged from theirs.
Following graduation, Kleimer travelled to Paris and enrolled at the Académie Colarossi, one of the main ateliers welcoming foreign students in the early twentieth century. He then moved on to Normandy, where he painted landscapes and village studies, experimenting with how surface texture and colour planes could carry atmosphere without veering into abstraction. In 1907 he crossed the Atlantic to the United States, working as a decorative painter, before returning to Sweden in 1910 and settling permanently in Malmö with his partner Thelma Pauline Holgersson.
In Malmö, Kleimer made his home at Kleimershus in the Fridhem district, and the city became both subject and setting. He painted the Skeppsbron quayside, the silhouette of Malmöhus castle seen from the water, market scenes, and harbour views from angles that have since changed beyond recognition. His Skåne landscapes took in snow-covered farmyards, horses in beech forests, and summer fields under wide overcast skies. He also painted while travelling: a 1939 series of motifs from Bruges documents a working trip to Belgium in the months before the Second World War. Despite the era's pressure toward modernism, Kleimer remained committed to representational painting, and his work acquired the status of a visual record of a Malmö that no longer exists.
His 1916 exhibition at Skånes Konstförening was a clear public success, with all ten works sold. Later solo exhibitions followed at Malmö Museum in 1928 and in the SDS Hall in 1940 and 1941. Works by Kleimer are held in the collections of the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm and Regionmuseet Skåne. He also worked as an exlibrist and was associated with Swedish decorative print traditions alongside his painting practice.
On the Nordic auction market, Kleimer appears regularly at Skåne-based houses including Crafoord Auktioner and Halmstads Auktionskammare, reflecting a regional collector base with a strong interest in his Malmö and Skåne subjects. Across 13 lots recorded on Auctionist, top prices have reached 1,300 EUR for horse-and-beech-forest compositions and 1,500 SEK for Malmöhus castle views. Price levels remain modest, positioning him as an accessible regional painter with solid historical anchoring rather than a speculative market name.