ArtistSwedish
Lambert Werner
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At seventeen, Lambert Werner stood in front of Gösta Adrian Nilsson's vivid, kinetic paintings and understood that art could carry both color and force simultaneously. That encounter planted something in the Stockholm-born Werner that would take nearly a decade more to surface. Born on November 18, 1900, he came of age in a Sweden still largely peripheral to the European avant-garde, but he would spend the next thirty years fixing that distance himself.
In 1925, Werner moved to Berlin carrying two ambitions: to study medicine and to continue the piano studies he had pursued since childhood. Both gave way. Through the city's art circles he encountered Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, and the encounter proved decisive. Color-musical abstraction, the idea that painting could operate like music, organizing sensation rather than depicting objects, became the framework through which Werner began to develop his own visual thinking. He also experimented with sculpture, working in the shadow of Archipenko and Ossip Zadkine.
Paris followed Berlin. In 1928 Werner had his debut at the Galerie Mots et Image, presenting a group of lyrical abstractions. He then traveled widely through Europe, North Africa, and the Near East, absorbing visual traditions that fed directly into the symbolic figurative elements that would distinguish his mature work. By the 1940s he had settled into a personal idiom that art historians have described as sitting on the border between surrealism and spontaneism, one of the earliest informal approaches in Swedish painting. His compositions, often in mixed media combining oils with other materials, contained figures and faces that surfaced through layers of paint like half-remembered images rather than clear representation.
Werner's exhibition history over the following decades was unusually international for a Swedish artist of his generation. He showed at Galerie Raymond Creuze in Paris multiple times between 1951 and 1958, at Galerie Bremer in Berlin in 1952 and 1953, at Galerie Apollo in Brussels, at Galerie d'Art National in Lucerne, in Oslo, Munich, Nuremberg, Wuppertal-Barmen, Amsterdam, and in 1964 at the Armory Gallery in New York. In Italy he had solo shows in Rome, Milan, Florence, and Venice. Within Sweden, his primary home was Galleri Färg och Form in Stockholm, where he exhibited roughly every five years from 1949 until the year of his death in 1983. His work is held in the permanent collections of Moderna Museet and the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, and in the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris.
On the Auctionist platform, Werner's 13 recorded items are drawn primarily from Metropol and Stockholms Auktionsverk, with works including abstract oil paintings dated to 1937 and compositions in mixed media from 1949 and 1953. A beach scene titled "Strandbild från Svarta havet" (Shoreline from the Black Sea) and a work called "I månens sken" (In the Moonlight) offer glimpses into the figurative-symbolic dimension of his practice. Confirmed sale prices have reached 900 SEK, modest figures that reflect the limited current auction supply of his work rather than any settled ceiling on his market.