Olle Baertling

The decisive turn came after the war, when Baertling traveled to Paris and enrolled first at André Lhote's school and then at Fernand Léger's atelier. He parted ways with Lhote quickly over disagreements about contour lines in nature, but the exposure to the Parisian Concrete Art scene - and especially the encounter with Mondrian's work in 1948 - redirected his practice entirely. From 1949 onward he worked exclusively in non-representational painting. He quit the bank seven years later to commit to art full time.

By the mid-1950s Baertling had arrived at the formal system that defines his entire mature output: the Open Form. Working with triangular fields of color bounded by bands of black, he positioned the apexes of the triangles beyond the edges of the canvas. The canvas becomes a fragment of a larger event, and the eye is sent outward into imagined space. He described this as a way of making paintings that could not be bounded. The colors he used were equally systematic - secondary colors (violet, orange, green) and what he called Baertling-white, a faintly green-tinted tone - chosen because they could not be found in nature and carried no associative weight. In 1958 he extended the same thinking into sculpture, producing steel structures that behave like three-dimensional contour lines lifted from the painted surface.

His international standing grew steadily through the late 1950s and 1960s. He exhibited regularly at Galerie Denise René in Paris from 1955 onward, the gallery most closely identified with European Concrete and Kinetic Art. In 1963 he represented Sweden at the 7th São Paulo Biennial and received the Prize of Honor. He participated in exhibitions across the United States, including 17 solo shows, and his work entered MoMA's collection ("Agriaki", 1959). A retrospective at Malmö Konsthall and Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 1981, the year of his death on May 2, underscored his place in Swedish postwar art. Moderna Museet now holds the world's largest Baertling collection: 153 works across painting, sculpture, and graphic art.

At auction, Baertling's work is handled primarily by the major Swedish houses. In the Auctionist database, 52 items are indexed, predominantly through Stockholms Auktionsverk (Magasin 5, Sickla, Göteborg branches combined account for the majority). Top recorded prices include "Deny", a color lithograph, at 41,000 SEK; "Assuan", a signed and numbered serigraph, at 35,186 SEK; and "Xau" at 32,400 SEK. Paintings command significantly higher prices - works on canvas have sold for several hundred thousand SEK at Bukowskis. Signed and numbered prints in good condition represent the accessible entry point for collectors, while the paintings and sculptures attract the strongest competition.