ArtistAustrian-Swedish
Felix Hatz
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Born in Vienna on 6 October 1904, Felix Walter Hatz came to Sweden as a young child and grew up in Skåne, the southernmost province with its flat agricultural plains and proximity to Denmark. That dual heritage — Central European roots planted in southern Swedish soil — would define his sensibility for the rest of his life.
Hatz trained formally at Konstakademien in Stockholm from 1928 to 1933, receiving a thorough grounding in the Swedish academic tradition. He then crossed the Øresund to study under Aksel Jørgensen at Kunstakademiet in Copenhagen in 1934. Jørgensen was among the most influential teachers of graphic arts in Scandinavia, and the Copenhagen period sharpened Hatz's instinct for printed line and tonal contrast — skills that would surface later in his numbered lithograph editions.
His early paintings bore the clear imprint of Edvard Munch: expressive landscapes, charged still lifes of flowers, and urban scenes where colour carried psychological weight. From the summer of 1944 he worked seasonally at Stenhuggeriet in Söndrum, just north of Halmstad, where he fell into a close orbit with artists of the Halmstad Group including Sven X:et Erixson. The Halmstad Group was Sweden's primary surrealist tendency, and though Hatz never fully adopted surrealism, the company pushed him toward bolder formal experimentation.
From the 1950s his canvases shed the last traces of descriptive representation. Colour planes became autonomous — broad, luminous fields that owed as much to Matisse as to the Nordic tradition. His prints followed a parallel arc, moving from figurative motifs toward compositional works that played pure chromatic relationships against one another. His numbered colour lithographs, issued in editions of up to 160, brought this late visual language to a wide audience.
Hatz is held in permanent collections at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Göteborgs Konstmuseum, Malmö Museum, Kalmar Konstmuseum, Ystads Konstmuseum, Norrköpings Konstmuseum, Gävle Museum, and Nasjonalgalleriet in Oslo — a breadth that reflects sustained institutional recognition across both Sweden and Norway. He died in Stockholm on 30 March 1999, having spent almost a century bridging Austrian and Scandinavian visual cultures.
On the Auctionist platform, 13 Hatz works have been catalogued across auction houses in Skåne and the greater Stockholm region, including Skånes Auktionsverk, Stockholms Auktionsverk Helsingborg, and Crafoord Auktioner Lund. His oils on canvas command the highest results, with the top recorded sale at 4,200 SEK for a landscape and 2,200 SEK for a still life. His numbered colour lithographs from the 160-edition series — including the titled work "Tingvallaland" — also appear at auction, reflecting continuing collector interest in his graphic output alongside his paintings.