KunstenaarSwedish
Berndt Wennström
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Berndt Wennström was born in Stockholm in 1945 and grew up in Bromma, in the city's western suburbs. The place that shaped his art, however, was Södermalm, the southern island where he has lived for most of his adult life and which supplies nearly all of his pictorial material: streets, parks, cyclists, people waiting, people talking, people passing through.
He trained as a graphic designer at Konstfack, the University of Arts, Crafts and Design, between 1965 and 1969. After graduating, he and two friends rented studio space from Staffan Hallström on Munkbrogatan in Gamla Stan. That arrangement became, by his own account, his real education. Hallström, a painter known for rich, spontaneous color and direct brushwork, left a lasting imprint on Wennström's approach to the canvas: he learned from Hallström the technique of suddenly introducing a stroke of black with calligraphic precision to charge the surrounding light areas with unexpected vitality, a method Hallström had absorbed partly from Willem de Kooning.
Wennström made his public debut in 1971 with a solo exhibition at Galleri Prisma in Stockholm. Through the following decades he sustained himself partly through design work in book publishing and advertising while building a consistent exhibiting career. He has had a large number of solo exhibitions since that debut and participated in group exhibitions across Sweden.
His paintings move between the figurative and the abstract without fully committing to either. The starting point is nearly always the representational, a figure on a bicycle, a gathering in a park, a lone pedestrian, but the same motif can be developed across multiple canvases toward increasingly loosened form. His human figures are always recognizable but deliberately depersonalized; his treatment of space, by contrast, tends toward the nonfigurative, built from warm and cool color fields that establish an emotional climate without describing a place literally. He is particularly attentive to cyclists, and his images of them moving through Stockholm have become one of the consistent threads across his body of work.
His prints, especially lithographs, including the series Cornelislitografier, have circulated broadly and appear regularly in Swedish auction rooms. His work is held in public collections at Nationalmuseum Stockholm, Norrköpings konstmuseum, Sundsvalls museum, Västerås konstmuseum, Laholms Teckningsmuseum, Eksjö museum, Statens konstråd, and Sveriges riksdag, as well as the municipality of Kiruna.
At auction, Wennström appears predominantly through Stockholm houses, with Crafoord Stockholm handling nearly a third of his lots. His market is active and consistent, driven primarily by paintings rather than prints. Top results include "Rastplats" at 9,500 SEK and "Högalidssparken" at 7,000 SEK. Works on paper and lithographs trade at lower multiples. With 83 lots recorded and no currently active listings, his secondary market reflects steady demand among collectors of Swedish post-war urban painting.