KunstenaarSwedish
Bertil Gadö
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Karl Bertil Gadö was born on 20 July 1916 in Malmö, where he would remain deeply rooted throughout his long life. His formal training began at Skånska målarskolan in Malmö between 1933 and 1935, after which he continued to develop his practice largely through independent study. The Scanian art environment of the 1930s and 1940s was unusually fertile ground for experimental painting, and Gadö would come to occupy a distinctive place within it.
In the late 1940s, Gadö joined Imaginisterna, a Malmö-based avant-garde group founded in 1948 by Max Walter Svanberg. The group took its cues from artists such as Max Ernst and Paul Klee, deliberately moving away from the tight illusionism associated with Salvador Dali in favor of more painterly, subjective approaches to surrealist imagery. Other members included Carl-Otto Hultén, Anders Österlin, and Gösta Kriland. Gadö participated in the group's 1949 exhibition at Malmö Museum and in subsequent shows in Hälsingborg and Stockholm in 1951.
By 1952, Gadö had left Imaginisterna as his own work became more intensely surrealist in character. That same year he was elected to the international surrealist group Phoenix, organized by Walter Grab, which placed him alongside the German painters Edgar Ende and Rudolf Schlichter and the Swiss-American artist Kurt Seligmann. In 1951 he had already participated in the first São Paulo Biennale at the Museo de Arte Moderna in Brazil - a significant international exposure at an early stage in his career.
Gadö's work across the subsequent decades moved through several phases while maintaining a continuous thread of otherworldly imagery. He painted landscapes, street scenes, and flower still lifes alongside more abstract surrealist compositions, and also worked in ink and wash drawing and printmaking. By around 1980, his practice arrived at what became his most distinctive body of work: paintings organized around cosmic motifs, with clear contour lines enclosing spaces filled in restrained scales of brown and gray tones. These later paintings, with their themes of mankind in relation to the cosmos, represent the most sustained expression of his long career.
His work is held in the collections of Moderna Museet and Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, as well as Malmö Museum. A monograph, "Bertil Gadö - Bilder om människa och kosmos" (Images of mankind and the cosmos), was published in connection with Lunds universitet. Gadö died in 2014 at the age of 97.
On the Swedish auction market, Gadö appears primarily at Malmö-based houses, with Crafoord Auktioner alone accounting for 25 of the 41 lots in the Auctionist index. His oil paintings command the strongest results, with the work "Metropolis" achieving 16,600 SEK and other significant oils selling in the 9,000-9,500 SEK range. Drawings and prints are also represented. The concentration of his market in Malmö reflects both his biography and the sustained local collector interest in the Scanian avant-garde.