ArtistGerman-Swedish
Martin Poser
5 active items
Martin Werner Poser was born on December 8, 1909 in Leipzig, the son of bookbinder Max Poser and Alma Reicholt. He trained at art schools in Leipzig and Nuremberg through the 1920s, laying technical foundations in both fine art and applied crafts. Before settling permanently, he spent the early 1930s travelling through France, Switzerland, Italy, Bulgaria, and the Nordic countries - study trips that shaped his eye for light and place rather than style for its own sake.
In the first half of the 1930s Poser arrived in Sweden and made Gothenburg his home. The city, with its working harbour, tram lines, and West Coast light, gave him a subject that sustained a career of more than six decades. From the late 1940s he also kept a summer studio on Marstrand, the fortified island off the Bohuslän coast, and the combination of urban Gothenburg and open coastal scenery defines the geographic range of his work. At the end of the 1970s he moved to nearby Lödöse but continued to work from the Marstrand studio until his death on April 8, 1999.
Poser's practice was unusually broad for a painter of his generation. Alongside oil paintings and watercolours depicting figures, portraits, and landscapes, he worked in graphics, ceramics, and silversmithing. His public commissions reflect this range: decorative tilework and murals for Kungsholm School and the Folkets hus in Sävedalen show an artist equally at home with architecture-scale work and the intimacy of a harbour sketch. He exhibited at Olsen's art gallery and the GHT center in Gothenburg, and also showed in Uddevalla and in Nakskov, Denmark.
On the auction market, Poser's work appears regularly at Gothenburg auction houses, with Göteborgs Auktionsverk accounting for the largest share of the 24 lots recorded in the Auctionist database. Works range from Gothenburg neighbourhood scenes such as Redbergsplatsen to harbour motifs and Slottskogen watercolours. Prices at auction have typically settled in the range of 400 to 1,000 SEK, reflecting his status as a well-represented regional artist whose work remains accessible to collectors in the city he made his own.