ArtistSwedish
Bertil Berg
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Bertil Berg was born on 11 March 1935 in the Örgryte parish of Gothenburg and died on 9 September 2010 in Lindome, Västra Götaland. He trained at the School of Arts and Crafts in Gothenburg and later at Valands målarskola, the painting school that would eventually become part of the Academy of Fine Arts at the University of Gothenburg.
Berg worked across painting, printmaking, and sculpture, but it is his lithographs - particularly the colour prints from the late 1960s through the 1980s - that circulate most widely on the secondary market today. His visual language drew on Surrealism and science fiction imagery, placing unexpected forms in unanchored space. The palette tended toward restrained, neutral tones, but the motifs themselves carried a strong graphic presence. His prints were produced in numbered editions and signed by hand.
In his sculptural work Berg turned frequently to plexiglas, exploiting the material's transparency to layer reality and reflection. A viewer looking at or through a piece encounters the actual world filtered and displaced, which aligned closely with the distancing effects in his print work. He was a member of the artist group Sex Aspekter (Six Aspects), which included Roj Friberg, Bernt Jonasson, Folke Lind, Åke Nilsson, and Gunnar Thorén.
Berg held his first solo exhibition at Galleri Prisma in Stockholm in 1964, the same year he showed at Unge Kunstneres Samfund in Oslo. Over the following decades he exhibited widely: further shows at Galleri Prisma (1967, 1969, 1972, 1974), Galleri Maneten in Gothenburg (1965), and at Göteborgs Konstmuseum (1972). He also participated in international exhibitions, including the 1. Mai-Salon in Berlin in 1982. His work entered public collections including Moderna museet in Stockholm, Nationalmuseum, and Göteborgs Konstmuseum, as well as Malmö Museum and Hjørring Museum of Art in Denmark. He received the Hallands läns kulturstipendium in 1965 and Göteborgs stads kulturstipendium in 1967, among other grants.
On the Nordic auction market Berg's work appears modestly but steadily. In the Auctionist database he has 18 items recorded, with auction results ranging from colour lithographs signed and numbered from the 1970s and 1980s. The top result in the database is 1,300 SEK for a signed composition litograph from 1977. His prints trade primarily at Swedish regional houses including Helsingborgs Auktionskammare, Gomér and Andersson in Jönköping, and Metropol. Given his presence in major museum collections, there remains a reasonable gap between his institutional standing and current auction valuations, which reflects the modest market for post-war Swedish graphic art generally.