Ulf Wahlberg

Everything shifted when Wahlberg traveled to the United States for the first time in 1965. Three months in America introduced him to a visual landscape that Swedish abstraction had not prepared him for: the scale of American cities, the chrome of parked cars under freeway lights, the particular melancholy of machines left in lots and fields. He returned with a new subject matter and a new relationship to figuration. The drag racers and highway scenes he began painting in the mid-1960s were not straightforward pop art responses to American culture. They were Swedish encounters with it, filtered through a sensibility that valued restraint, silence and the quality of evening light.

Light remained the organizing principle of Wahlberg's work across its many phases. In his neorealist car paintings, light is what gives chrome its melancholy. In his still lifes, spare compositions dominated by grey-blue tones are anchored by a single contrasting color, a warm lamp glow or a shaft of window light. In his fantasy landscapes, painted between 1974 and 1977, light becomes atmospheric and unstable. He published a book titled Skrotbilar in 1981, with a preface by the poet Lars Forsell, gathering oil paintings, watercolors and graphics around the theme of the wreck and obsolescence.

Wahlberg was appointed professor at the art school in Umeå from 1989 to 1994, a period that brought his thinking into contact with a new generation of Swedish artists. He died on 26 January 2014 in Stockholm. His work is held in the permanent collections of Nationalmuseum, Moderna Museet and Göteborgs Konstmuseum, as well as Norrköpings Konstmuseum. At auction his paintings sell across a wide range: intimate nocturnes at Swedish regional houses move in the low thousands, while larger paintings with strong provenance have achieved results in the five-figure euro range. Galleri Mats Bergman in Stockholm continues to represent his estate.