Modern Art + Design presents "SERGAE" by Olle Bærtling
Olle Bærtling, "SERGAE"
Like many other artists, Baertling experienced resistance during his time, for a long time he was in Sweden "the ever-controversial banker who tried to paint", although unlike many contemporary artists he reached far beyond the borders of his home country during his lifetime.
Baertling abandoned the optical art that had inspired him for some time and began to create his own style in which triangles and diagonals became the main theme. From basic geometric elements, he built up a new visual world of measurements, proportions and synthetic, programmed colour tones. Intense colour fields enclosed in black diagonal contours create a dynamic that few other artists have achieved. The black lines which are slightly arc-shapes were assessed by Baertling at the very end. In the 1960s, as is evident in the auction's "SERGAE", the angular tips were moved outside the picture surface, thus creating his "open form", in which the reflections on intersecting directions in space were given their own compositional form. Baertling preferred artificial shades of colour that did not evoke natural associations and believed that black was a magical colour, light, happy and beautiful. Gunnar Berefelt describes the effect of the colours on each other as follows: "Probably the most tangible and active effect in Baertling's art is the boundary contrast: when two colours are given a sufficiently long and distinct boundary, they seem to alternately enter the domain of the neighbouring colour. It is precisely at the boundary line that the two colour fields oscillate and flutter."
To be sold at Modern Art + Design
Estimate 1 000 000 - 1 500 000 SEK
Viewing: November 9 – 14, Berzelii Park 1, Stockholm
Open: weekdays 11 am – 6 pm, weekends 11 am – 4 pm
Live Auction: Live Auction, Arsenalsgatan 2, Stockholm