KunstenaarSwedish
Ivar Morsing
2 actieve items
Hans Gustaf Ivar Morsing was born in 1919 in Ängelholm, where his father, the painter Leopold Morsing, kept a summer studio. The family settled in Stockholm in 1923, though summers at the farm Källeholm near Läckeby outside Kalmar gave Ivar his earliest education in looking at Swedish light and landscape.
His formal training began with Edvin Ollers' summer courses and continued at Gösta and Irma Bergh's Technical School in Stockholm from 1940 to 1941, where he studied decorative arts, illustration, and life drawing. He then spent a year in the school Isaac Grünewald had founded after leaving the Royal Academy, an experience that pushed him toward the post-Expressionist current running through Swedish modernism at the time.
Travel became a second education. He visited Denmark, France, and Italy in the late 1940s, spent an extended period in Tunisia from 1950 to 1951, returned to Paris in spring 1953, and in 1954 made a motorcycle journey through Portugal, Spain, and Morocco. These trips layered the warmth and dry colour of the Mediterranean over the cooler palette he had built in Sweden. In the late 1960s he extended his wandering to the United States and Central America.
His painting developed through a sustained tension between geometric abstraction, absorbed from the post-war European avant-garde, and a figurative impulse rooted in Swedish nature. The decisive influence on his mature work came from Rembrandt's luminosity and Turner's atmospheric dissolution, alongside Bonnard's high-keyed, sensuous colour. From the 1980s, Öland and Provence became his two fixed anchors, and canvases from both places share an energetic, thickly applied brushwork in which forms dissolve into surrounding light rather than asserting hard edges.
He exhibited at Kalmar Museum in 1953 and 1955, at Jönköpings Museum in 1956, and at Konstnärshuset in Stockholm in 1961. He is represented in the permanent collections of Nationalmuseum, Moderna Museet, Kalmar Museum, and Jönköpings Museum. He received the Stockholm City Cultural Prize in 1972, the National Artist's Scholarship in 1973, 1974, and 1978, and the Kalmar Cultural Prize in 1976. He died on 5 December 2009 in Stockholm, aged 90.
At auction, Morsing appears steadily in the Swedish mid-market. The 61 lots tracked on Auctionist come predominantly from Stockholms Auktionsverk, Helsingborgs Auktionskammare, Auctionet, and Metropol, with top results for Provence subjects such as "Den svart klädda, Cotignac" at 4,800 SEK and "Byvägen, Cotignac" at 4,009 SEK. His work sits in an accessible price range for Swedish post-war painting, where the Provence and Öland subjects tend to command the firmest bids.