ArtistSwedish
Gerd Nordenskjöld
0 active items
Born on 30 November 1913 in Vänersborg, Gerd Nordenskjöld came to abstract painting through a gradual and committed artistic education that stretched across Sweden and France. Her first formal training was with Saga Walli in Gothenburg, followed by studies with Börge Hovedskou in 1946. It was her entry into Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen's Moderna konstskolan in Stockholm in 1948, however, that set the course of her career. There she spent five years, absorbing the theory and practice of non-figurative art at a time when it remained marginal in Sweden.
Bjerke-Petersen introduced Nordenskjöld to a circle of French concrete artists - among them Maurice Estéve, Jean Dewasne, Jean Deyrolle and Henri Goetz, the latter two of whom she would later study with directly in Paris. The influence of this milieu was immediate, though it took several years before she arrived at a style that was distinctly her own. She moved to Paris and in 1955 held her debut solo exhibition at Galerie Arnaud. The show sold nearly in its entirety, and Le Monde published a favourable review. According to the gallery owner, she was among the most accomplished non-French artists ever to have shown there.
She returned to Sweden in 1957, where her first Stockholm solo exhibition, at the Sture Gallery, was met with similarly strong critical reception. During the late 1950s she refined her approach, de-emphasising linearity and increasingly concentrating on surface structure, building compositions through the movement and transformation of colour and form. Her paintings carry a quality that resists easy categorisation: concrete in their refusal of representation, yet invested with something closer to spiritual suggestion than pure formal exercise. Works from this period carry titles such as 'Samsara', 'Tropical' and 'Grå rytm', hinting at an inner landscape rather than an outer one.
Nordenskjöld continued to exhibit and develop her practice through the following decades. She also maintained a correspondence with Denise René, the Parisian gallerist who was central to the international dissemination of concrete and kinetic art. Nordenskjöld died on 7 October 1999 in Gothenburg, having worked across more than five decades.
At auction, her work appears almost exclusively through Bukowskis Stockholm, which held a dedicated sale titled 'The Concretist Gerd Nordenskjöld' featuring works from the mid to late 1950s acquired directly from the artist. The 15 items tracked on Auctionist include untitled compositions alongside titled works such as 'Tropical', 'Grå rytm' and 'Samsara'. Realised prices at recent Bukowskis auctions have ranged from approximately 400 to 900 SEK per lot.