ArtistSwedish
Inge Schiöler
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Inge Schiöler was born on 10 March 1908 in Strömstad, a small town on the Swedish West Coast close to the Norwegian border. He died on 27 April 1971 in Stockholm. His upbringing in Strömstad, with a father who was an amateur botanist and a mother trained as a musician at the Academy of Music, gave him early exposure to the natural world and to disciplined creative practice, though nothing in that background quite prepared for the trajectory his life and career would follow.
After finishing his final exams in Strömstad in 1925, Schiöler moved to Gothenburg and enrolled at the Craft Association's school in October of that year. In autumn 1926 he began at Valand Art School under Tor Bjurström, the teacher whose influence defined what later became known as Göteborgskolorismen, the Gothenburg Colorist movement. Fellow students included Ragnar Sandberg, Ivan Ivarson, and Åke Göransson. What bound them was not a manifesto but a shared intensity of approach: colour as the primary expressive instrument, nature as the recurring subject, and form rendered with broad, energetic brushwork rather than careful delineation.
Schiöler achieved recognition early. By the late 1920s and early 1930s his reputation was already growing. Then, in October 1933, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia at Betaniastiftelsen's hospital in Gothenburg and transferred in November to St Jörgens psychiatric hospital on Hisingen. He would remain there for nearly 27 years.
The paradox of Schiöler's career is that his most decisive artistic breakthrough came during his years at St Jörgens. Between 1933 and 1941, while institutionalised, he produced work of such force that in autumn 1938, Svensk-Franska Konstgalleriet mounted a retrospective of 149 works that stands as the most significant exhibition of his lifetime. The hallucinations and altered perception that accompanied his illness appear to have fed rather than suppressed his visual imagination: colour became more saturated, forms more direct, the mood of his coastal and forest landscapes more charged.
For a period of nine years within his hospitalisation he stopped painting entirely, but he returned to the work. In 1956–57, his family arranged the construction of a cottage for him at Sydkoster, the southern of the Koster islands just off the coast near Strömstad. The house gave Schiöler a fixed base and a connection to the landscape that had shaped his eye from childhood. The sea, the cliffs, the light on the water between the skerries: these subjects became the core of his mature work. On 27 October 1960, following the introduction of new medication, he was discharged on probation and in practice left St Jörgens for good.
The decade that followed was productive. Schiöler worked the Koster and Bohuslän coastline with the same rigour he had shown in earlier years, producing seascapes and landscapes with an immediacy that has kept his work continuously in demand. His technique, broad strokes and bold colour, carries the physical sensation of the West Coast: salt wind, grey-green water, granite worn flat by the sea.
His work is held in Göteborgs konstmuseum, Nationalmuseum, Moderna museet, Nordiska Akvarellmuseet, Kalmar konstmuseum, Malmö Museum, Borås konstmuseum, and Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen. A retrospective exhibition, "Landskap utan gräns," was later mounted at Liljevalchs Konsthall in Stockholm.
At Swedish auction, Schiöler's 66 recorded lots are concentrated at the Gothenburg houses that reflect his strongest collector base: Stockholms Auktionsverk Göteborg (14 lots), Bukowskis Göteborg (11), and Göteborgs Auktionsverk (10). Pastels and gouaches perform well alongside his oils, with "Krysantemer" in pastel reaching 11,500 SEK, a gouache forest interior fetching 10,500 SEK, and a tree study selling for 7,000 SEK.