Curt Asker

Curt Asker (1930 – 2015) studied at Académie Libre in Stockholm and at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, where he was a professor from 1977 to 1978. Asker lived and worked in Lacoste in Provence, in Paris, in Brantevik on Österlen, and in Stockholm.

Asker moved effortlessly between painting, graphics, photography, and weightless, floating sculpture. He sought to capture the ephemeral – strands of grass in motion at the roadside, a beam of sunlight breaking through the haze, or a perceived shift in colour in the composition of the earth. Asker paints those near divine moments of experience that leave a strongly present afterimage.

"Asker's works are poetically gliding, as fluid as the ink notations of Henri Michaux, unnervingly tangible and intusive as the 1950s paintings of Jean Fautrier and Wols. In the subtly organic drawings and in the weightless sculpture kites that floated above Österlen's sand dunes, the breathtaking utopia reigns that everything is possible."

(from Mårten Castenfors's essay ”I modernismens kölvatten”, SAK publication 110)

Curt Asker is represented in the collections at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Gothenburg Museum of Art, Malmö Museum, Musée Réattu in Arles, and Kalmar Art Museum, as well as in private collections in Europe and the USA.