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Harald Lyth
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Harald Lyth was born in Gothenburg in 1937 and has spent most of his working life in Stockholm. His formal training began at the School of Design and Crafts in Gothenburg from 1955 to 1959, where he developed the technical and spatial thinking that would later define his approach to the picture surface. He then studied at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm from 1960 to 1965, graduating into a Swedish art scene that was debating fiercely between figuration and abstraction. Lyth found his own path through that debate.
Since the 1970s, Lyth has been driven by what he describes as a wonder at the possibilities of the picture room. His paintings work in a space between dream and wakefulness, rhythmic and quietly musical, structured around architectural compositions built from a cool, precisely calibrated palette. He works with brush, chalk and charcoal on canvas, paper, floor or wall - choosing the ground according to what a given idea requires. The method involves attack and responsiveness: a visual interception that continues through reduction until something opens up to color and its signs. The results resist easy categorization: they are neither purely gestural nor geometric, neither illustrative nor hermetically conceptual.
Public recognition arrived steadily. In the 1970s his abstract landscapes attracted serious critical attention, and through the 1980s his work moved into major Swedish and international collections. He is represented at the Nationalmuseum and Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and at the Malmö Museum. His work in public space has been substantial: monumental glass walls at Karolinska Institutet, the SEB head office in Rissne and the Bonnier House in Stockholm stand among the most visible; in 1994 he created large shimmering blue tapestries, each eleven metres long, for the Posten head office. He also designed stage sets for Nationaltheatret in Oslo, including productions of Strindberg's A Dream Play and Botho Strauss' The Park.
His exhibition record spans decades and continents. Solo exhibitions at Thielska Gallery in Stockholm, FORUM in Zurich, the Sao Paulo Biennial, and Simon/Neuman Gallery in New York are among the highlights. In 2022, his exhibition 'Probabilities' at Liljevalchs was described as the largest of his career to that point. More recently, Sven-Harrys Konstmuseum and the NOBA Nordic Baltic contemporary art platform have presented retrospective and survey shows that reaffirm his position as one of the central figures of post-war Swedish abstraction. He returned to the Royal Institute of Art as professor of painting from 1989 to 1994 - less than thirty years after completing his own studies there.
His auction market presence is built primarily in Sweden, with Bukowskis Stockholm, Stockholms Auktionsverk and Uppsala Auktionskammare accounting for most of his hammer results on the Auctionist platform. The highest recorded sale globally is 55,000 USD for the mixed-media work 'MONOGRAM' (1989) at Bukowskis Stockholm in 2018. On Auctionist, his results span from modest lithograph lots at a few hundred SEK up to 1,100 SEK for compositions in mixed media, with a notable sale of 'Murarlod och brysselspets' - a boxed set with texts by Bengt Jangefeldt - reaching 500 EUR. Prints and lithographs from series such as 'SAGA 90' and 'Meddelanden' are among his most traded multiples.