ArtistSwedish
Gunnar Wallentin
0 active items
Before Gunnar Wallentin ever studied at an academy, he was already painting at sea. Born in 1905 in Brunnby parish on the Kullen peninsula in Skåne, he came from a family of craft and colour - his father was a master painter. At the age of ten he began work as a painting apprentice, and by his teenage years he had signed on as a sailor in the merchant navy. The sea and the Skåne coastline would remain persistent presences in his work throughout a career that spanned most of the twentieth century.
His formal training came later and was thorough. After a debut exhibition in Helsingborg in 1924, he enrolled at Wilhelmson's painting school in Stockholm in 1927, followed by study at Maison Watteau and then in Paris at the Académie Julian, Académie Colarossi, and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière - three institutions that shaped generations of Scandinavian painters. Study trips extended his range further: Italy, Sardinia, Spain, England, Nigeria, and South Africa all left traces in his sketchbooks and on his canvases.
Wallentin worked primarily in oil and watercolour, producing figure studies, portraits, and landscapes that reflect both his coastal roots and his international formation. He was also a sculptor, carving smaller works in wood. His faith shaped a significant portion of his public output: a committed Baptist, he created decorative paintings for his parish church in Helsingborg, painted the altarpiece Fiskarfänget (The Fisherman's Catch) for Mölle chapel in 1935, and completed commissions for Nyhamnsläge school and the Baptist folk high school Sjövik in Folkärna. These works sit at the intersection of Nordic realism and devotional imagery, grounded in the coastal communities he knew well.
He exhibited widely across southern Sweden - Helsingborg, Malmö, Kristianstad, Halmstad, Ängelholm - and further north in Örebro and Borås. He participated in an exhibition with Christian artists at the Young People's Salon in Stockholm in 1948, and was represented in Kullens Konstförening Kulla-Konst in Höganäs and in the Skåne Art Association's exhibitions in Malmö. A work by Wallentin is held in the collection of Eskilstuna Art Museum. He settled in Mölle, the small fishing village below Kullaberg, and remained there until his death in 1997 at the age of ninety-one.
On the auction market, Wallentin's paintings appear mainly at houses in northwestern Skåne that knew him best. Höganäs Auktionsverk and Auktionsverket Engelholm account for the largest share of his lots on Auctionist, followed by Helsingborgs Auktionskammare and Bukowskis. All 24 catalogued works are paintings. Prices have been modest, with top lots reaching 1,300 SEK, which reflects the regional and devotional character of much of his output rather than any absence of quality in the work itself.