ArtistSwedish
Sven Bertil Herlow Svensson
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Before Bertil Herlow Svensson ever picked up a welding tool, he had visited some sixty countries as a merchant sailor. That life at sea - working on yachts, reading the geometry of rigging and hull - may have planted the instinct for structure that would define his sculptures. When he finally settled into a studio in the mid-1960s, he brought the same spatial curiosity to aluminum tubes and steel wire.
Herlow Svensson was entirely self-taught, and his breakthrough came swiftly. At age 35, in 1967, he participated in the Multikonst exhibition - a showcase dedicated to multiples and reproducible art objects - with a three-dimensional wall construction called '10 x 10'. The piece was built from thin aluminum tubes stretched between steel wires, and it announced the method he would pursue for the next decade: mathematically precise, non-figurative, and transparent in the literal sense, opening space rather than filling it. Critics drew comparisons to Naum Gabo and the Swiss sculptor Max Bill.
From 1966 to roughly 1977, the aluminum constructions were built around a base unit of a 40 cm tube, generating larger compositions through geometric repetition - spheres, sectors, fragmented volumes. Titles like 'Sektorns mekanik' (The Mechanics of the Sector) and 'Fragmentarisk sfär' (Fragmentary Sphere) describe rather than poeticize what the viewer sees. Later he expanded into brass and mixed metals, adding weight and warmth to forms that had previously emphasized airy transparency.
He established his gallery presence through Galerie Aronowitsch in Stockholm, where he had his first solo show, and was subsequently represented by Galeri Nordenhake during the 1980s - a gallery that would become one of Scandinavia's most significant platforms for international contemporary art. Public commissions followed: a permanent sculpture was installed at Lund University's Holger Crafoord economic center in 1993. His final exhibition during his lifetime was at Trelleborg Museum in 2010, after which the municipality acquired two works for its collection.
Herlow Svensson was born on March 2, 1929 in Vaxtorp, Halland, and died on October 14, 2012 in Svedala, Skane. Alongside sculpture he produced color lithographs - geometric compositions sometimes issued as diptychs or tetraptychs - that share the same constructivist logic as his three-dimensional work.
On the auction market, his sculptures draw considerably more attention than his prints. A numbered aluminum edition of 'Sektorns mekanik' sold for 17,000 SEK at Bukowskis in 2021, nearly triple its high estimate, while unique aluminum constructions from the late 1960s have reached 13,000 SEK. Crafoord Auktioner in Lund has handled the largest share of his works at auction, followed by Auctionet and Markus Auktioner, with Stockholms Auktionsverk also featuring his sculptures. Eleven lots appear in current auction records, with prints typically finishing below 1,000 SEK and sculptures commanding multiples of that figure.