ArtistSwedish
Bertil Almlöf
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Bertil Almlöf spent nearly a century moving between two poles: the rigorous training of one of Sweden's most demanding art schools, and the wide, flat light of Östergötland that would define his image-making for the rest of his life. Born in Linköping on 13 June 1930, he grew up in the landscape he would later paint obsessively - the open plains, the meadows streaked with seasonal colour, the low horizons of central Sweden.
He enrolled at the Valand School of Fine Arts in Gothenburg in 1953, completing his studies in 1957. Valand was then, as now, a rigorous institution where the figurative and the experimental coexisted, and Almlöf absorbed both. He spent subsequent years working in Stockholm before settling permanently on a farm in Hovstad, outside Rimforsa in Kinda municipality, Östergötland. The farm gave him two things that mattered most: a painting studio with good north light, and a workshop equipped for printmaking.
Almlöf worked across media with unusual consistency. His graphic output - woodcuts, lithographs, etchings - ran parallel to his painting practice throughout his career rather than serving as a secondary activity. The works balance figuration and abstraction, with recognisable landscape forms dissolving into fields of colour and pattern. His palette was characteristically strong: yellows, ochres, greens, and orange skies that carry emotional weight without tipping into expressionist excess. A late oil, "Ljus slätt" (2013), exemplifies his mature approach: a flood of yellow light across treeless terrain, the sky orange above a band of green, the whole image poised between representation and pure sensation.
His first solo exhibition at Östergötlands Museum in 1963 established his position in the Swedish art landscape. Over the following six decades he produced a substantial body of public works and showed consistently in the region and beyond. He was represented in the permanent collections of Moderna Museet in Stockholm - which holds 29 works, 27 of them graphic art - as well as in other significant Swedish and international institutions. A memorial exhibition was mounted at Östergötlands Museum following his death on 22 March 2024 in Rimforsa, the community where he had lived and worked for most of his adult life.
Almlöf's work appears at Swedish auction regularly, handled primarily by regional houses that know his market well. At Auctionet, the majority of his lots have passed through Gomér & Andersson Linköping, the house closest to his home territory, accounting for nine of the twenty-two lots in the current database. His highest recorded sale in the dataset reached 2,600 EUR for a pastel titled "Från en insjö", with lithographs and woodcuts trading in the 400-1,200 SEK range. The breadth of media represented - pastels, lithographs, woodcuts - reflects the full range of his studio practice and gives collectors multiple entry points to his work.