ArtistSwedish
Knut Irwe
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Born Knut Erik Irwe on 2 May 1912 in Trolleholm in Skåne, he spent three years in self-directed study before enrolling at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm in 1930, where he worked under Gösta von Hennigs, the cartoonist and painter Albert Engström, and Otte Sköld. After leaving Stockholm in 1934 he continued his training at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts under Kræsten Iversen in 1935 and 1936, followed by a year in Paris in 1938 studying under the French figurative painter Marcel Gromaire and working independently in Auvers-sur-Oise, the village north of Paris where Van Gogh spent his final weeks.
Irwe settled in Gothenburg in 1938, the city he would live in for the rest of his life. His early painting was shaped by the Gothenburg Colourists, the loose grouping of Swedish painters who had absorbed post-Impressionist colour from their own Paris studies in the 1910s and 1920s. Portraits, interiors with figures, animal subjects, and landscapes from Skåne and France formed the core of his figurative output.
After the spring of 1947 his work underwent a decisive tightening: colour became more constrained and the motif - still grounded in nature - was increasingly abstracted. During the 1950s he came closer to the idiom of Picasso and the French painter Maurice Estève, working with fragmented forms that retained just enough reference to recognisable subject matter. From the 1970s biblical subjects entered his repertoire, and he also began carving in wood, extending his practice beyond painting.
In 1955 and 1956 he directed a large-scale public project for Liseberg amusement park in Gothenburg: the decoration of the old Bergbanan mountain railway. Working with 15 painters and 17 carpenters over seven months, the team produced a stylized alpine landscape for the ride's setting. The commission stands as one of the more substantial public art collaborations in mid-century Gothenburg. He later taught at the Konstindustriskolan (School of Arts and Crafts) from 1957 to 1977 and at Hovedskous Painting School in 1966 and 1967, shaping a generation of Gothenburg-based students.
Irwe is represented in the collections of the National Museum in Stockholm, the Modern Museum, the Gothenburg Museum of Art, Malmö Museum, Lund Museum of Art, and Ystad Museum of Art, among others. He died on 23 November 2002 in Gothenburg. At auction, his works appear primarily in western Swedish houses: Göteborgs Auktionsverk accounts for the largest share of the 21 lots in our database, followed by Stockholms Auktionsverk Göteborg and Crafoord Auktioner in Lund. Prices have ranged from around 2,000 SEK for portraits to 6,753 SEK for a male nude study in oil, with flower still lifes and coastal motifs occupying the mid-range.