ArtistSwedish
Erik Jerken
2 active items
In 1921, the architect Ivar Tengbom was looking for a young painter to create the altarpiece for Högalid Church on Södermalm in Stockholm. He found Erik Jerken at the Royal Institute of Art, where Jerken was still a student, around 23 years old. The result was a neo-Byzantine retable that so convincingly mimicked medieval craftsmanship that many visitors assumed it was centuries old. It remains one of the most striking decorative commissions in early twentieth-century Stockholm.
Erik Johan Jerken was born on 17 June 1898 in Stockholm. He trained at Tekniska skolan from 1916 to 1918, then at Caleb Althin's painting school in 1918, before entering the Royal Institute of Art, where he studied until 1923. His talent was recognized early: he received the Duke's Medal for outstanding artistic ability during his studies, and in later years he was awarded the Stockholm City Hall Memorial Medal and made a knight of the Yugoslav Order of Saint Sava.
Beyond the Högalid commission, Jerken carried out decorative work for Stockholm City Hall and the Concert Hall in Stockholm, placing him among the artists who shaped the civic visual identity of the Swedish capital in the interwar period. He also worked as an art director on the 1924 silent film Gösta Berlings saga, directed by Mauritz Stiller and starring Greta Garbo in her first major screen role - a project that brought his design sensibility into early Swedish cinema.
His easel paintings occupy a different register from those monumental commissions. Jerken worked in thin, transparent brushstrokes, building up compositions with a restraint that owed something to French modernism without abandoning a distinctly Nordic light. His early work favored cool greens; later canvases grew warmer and more gestural. Still lifes and landscapes made up the core of his output, alongside figure studies and urban views of the Stockholm waterways. His work entered the collections of Nationalmuseum, Moderna Museet, Göteborgs konstmuseum, Waldemarsudde, and Västerås konstmuseum - a breadth of institutional recognition that was unusual for a painter who died at 49.
Jerken died on 27 October 1947 in Stockholm. On the auction market, his works appear regularly at Metropol, Stockholms Auktionsverk, and Auctionet. The Auctionist database holds 22 items, with 2 currently active. Recorded prices range from 600 SEK for smaller works to 1,250 EUR for a pastel figure study dated 1944. His still lifes and oil landscapes form the bulk of what trades, reflecting the range of his studio practice.