Olle Baertling Art

Art Brokerage: (1911-1981) Olle Baertling was born in Halmstad on the Swedish west-coast in 1911 and moved to Stockholm in 1928, where he worked in a bank and painted in his spare time. As an amateur artist his work was figurative and Nordic expressionist in style before he was influenced by the work of Matisse and van Gogh. Baertling married in 1939 and spent 1947 in England, where his studies of the city became increasingly abstract. His formal training took place in Paris the following year where his studied under André Lhote and Fernand Léger, and he held his first solo exhibition in Stockholm in 1949. From 1950 onwards his work was purely abstract. Particularly important to him was the work of French artist Auguste Herbin, whose concrete paintings of the 1940s adhered to strict principles of two-dimensionality and simple geometry. Baertling created clean areas of pure colour bordered by black diagonal lines, as well as experimenting with circles and after-images. From 1953 he used acute angles to create open forms which extend from the edges of the canvas into the surrounding space. It was around 1955 that he started to experiment with sculpture, translating his black lines into steel rods. The artist came to regard sculpture and painting as invisible forms, both aiming to create compositions in space. An artist and designer of international reputation, Baertling also worked with architects such as David Helldén on innovative building designs and held exhibitions worldwide. Baertling died in Stockholm in 1981.