ArtistSwedish
Curt Asker
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Curt Asker was born in Stockholm on 27 January 1930 and spent his formative years training at the Académie Libre and the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, where he studied painting from 1950 to 1955. The city shaped his early sensibility, but it was the landscapes he encountered in motion - forms glimpsed through car windows on long drives - that gave rise to one of his most original early works: hanging paper sculptures he called "watercolour-sculptures", constructed in the late 1950s from the fluid shapes his eye caught and his hand recorded.
Drawing was at the core of his practice throughout his life. Asker described himself above all as an observer and a draughtsman, someone who moved through the world with a sketchbook rather than a palette. His line drawings, lithographs, and etchings share a quality of sustained attention - forms rendered not to fix them but to follow their movement. This fidelity to the act of looking, rather than to any fixed compositional outcome, placed him close in spirit to figures like Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy, artists for whom landscape is a process rather than a backdrop.
In 1977 and 1978 he served as a professor at the Royal Institute of Art, and in 1981 he was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts, recognitions that marked his standing within Swedish artistic life without defining the more itinerant character of his career. From 1982 onward he made his base in Lacoste, in the Luberon hills of Provence, dividing his time between that landscape, Paris, and the fishing village of Brantevik on the Österlen coast of Sweden. These three places - Mediterranean rock and scrub, the density of a European capital, and the flat light of the Swedish south - ran continuously through his work.
International recognition came in the 1970s and 1980s, culminating in his selection to represent Sweden at the Venice Biennale in 1984. He exhibited widely across France and Sweden, including at Galerie Bernard Bouche in Paris, Galerie Inga Kondeyne in Berlin, and in group and solo exhibitions at major Scandinavian venues. His work entered the collections of Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Gothenburg Museum of Art, Malmö Museum, Musée Réattu in Arles, Musée Gassendi in Digne, and Bildmuseet in Umeå.
At auction, Asker's prints and graphics appear primarily through Swedish houses. Garpenhus Auktioner and Bukowskis Stockholm have handled the largest share of his work, with lithographs on rice paper and etchings being the most frequently offered formats. Signed and numbered lithographs including the "Komposition" series and a colour lithograph titled "Frö" have featured in recent sales, with prices in the range of 300 to 550 SEK. He died in Lacoste on 11 November 2015.