ArtistSwedish
Eskil Nordell
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Axel Eskil Ingemar Nordell spent his working life in Boxholm, a small industrial town in Östergötland, and painted the world around him - the flat agricultural landscape, the harbor at Lofoten, streets abroad - in a style that sits somewhere between folk painting and naive art. He did not train as a painter. He worked as a house painter and picked up brushwork in his own time, developing an approach to color and form through looking rather than through instruction.
Nordell was born on June 28, 1921 in Boxholm and died there on January 25, 2001, spending most of his eight decades in the same town. Study trips to Norway, France, and Italy gave him material and widened his visual vocabulary, but the sensibility he brought back was always his own. The fishermen's villages at Lofoten, urban street scenes from France, pastoral views from the Östergötland plain - all are rendered with the same flattened perspective and warm, sometimes earthy palette that marks his mature work.
His exhibition career started relatively late but moved quickly. He debuted in Norrköping in 1952, then showed at Gummesons konsthall in Stockholm in 1953 - one of the more active commercial gallery spaces for mid-century Swedish art - followed by solo presentations at Kalmar Museum and Jönköping Museum in 1955. These were substantive venues for a self-taught painter from a provincial town, and the pace suggests his work found an audience without difficulty. He worked across oil, pastel, gouache, and woodcut, the printmaking adding a harder-edged graphic quality to the softer atmospheric passages in his paintings.
Nordell is represented in the permanent collections of Östergötlands Museum, Norrköpings konstmuseum, and Kalmar konstmuseum. Still lifes, portraits, and landscapes account for the bulk of his output, with titles like "Fönsterbordet" and "Från slätten" giving a sense of how domestic and locally rooted much of the subject matter was.
On the auction market, Nordell's 35 works on Auctionist are concentrated almost entirely in paintings, with a smaller group of prints. The top sale reached 1,354 SEK for an oil titled "Septemberdag." Activity passes almost exclusively through regional Östergötland houses - Gomér & Andersson in Linköping accounts for nearly half of all lots - which accurately reflects both his geographic base and the character of his collecting audience.