Bertil Sjöberg

Bertil Sjöberg (born March 24, 1914 in Malmö ; † October 19, 1999 there ) was a Swedish painter .

Life

Bertil Sjöberg was of Swedish nationality, but European both biographically and artistically. His mother was Viennese, his father was a descendant of an industrial family, a Swedish officer and later a Swedish consul in Nice . Bertil Sjöberg spent his school days in Malmö, in the Stiftsgymnasium Melk an der Donau and in other boarding schools in Europe. He first studied art with Edward Berggren in Stockholm , then with Rostrup Boysen in Denmark and finished his studies with Kresten Iversen at the Royal Danish Academy of Art in Copenhagen . After the classic study trip to Paris in 1939, where Pierre Bonnard and Paul Cézanne made a lasting impression, and a first short stay in Ibiza , he spent four years on Bornholm . He then lived, now a family man, with his wife Bitten and son Miguel, first in Denmark, then from 1955 to 1970 on Ibiza.

Grupo Ibiza 59

For him, his stay in Ibiza not only meant a new world of motifs and inspirations, but above all the turn to informal art, which fundamentally influenced his work during this time.

Friendships with common artistic interests and goals developed across national borders among the artists living in Ibiza. This resulted in the Grupo Ibiza 59 , to which Erwin Bechtold , Erwin Broner, Hans Laabs, Katja Meirowsky, Bob Munford, Egon Neubauer, Antonio Ruiz and Heinz Trökes - with whom Bertil Sjöberg remained in contact for life - belonged. Later the artists Carlos Sansegundo, Pierre Haubensak and Bob Thompson joined them. Together, the group organized exhibitions that attracted attention beyond Spain. “They came from Barcelona, ​​Madrid and other galleries in Europe and wanted to see what we were doing there,” Bertil Sjöberg later recalled in an interview.

Watercolor and ink, Ibiza, 1960s

A large exhibition in the Berlin Haus am Waldsee , arranged by the Galerie Brusberg (then Hanover), made grupo ibiza 59 known in Germany as well.

"Apart from the assumed relationship in the choice of new forms of expression and means, there was a strange, surprising kind of community that unites us in our work," wrote Erwin Broner in the preface to the catalog. But the group began to break up. In 1964 the gallery owner Ivan Spencer (Ibiza) called an exhibition in the Leicester Galleries, London, at which not only the members of the Ibiza group but also other artists living in Ibiza such as Karl Fred Dahmen were represented, "Inspiration Ibiza". Bertil Sjöberg was first and foremost a loner, a manic worker, for whom any interpersonal contact, even with friends, meant a limitation in his artistic activity. Fortunately for him, perhaps also bad luck, because it was difficult for him to part with his pictures all his life, he met the experienced American gallery owner Sam Kaner, who in his Court Gallery, Copenhagen, besides the CoBrA group, other big names der Moderne exhibited and collaborated with international galleries, including Peggy Guggenheim. Sam Kaner showed Bertil Sjöberg regularly in solo exhibitions and in his summer exhibitions.

Malmö - vision and memory

After a stay in Torroella de Montgrí , Bertil Sjöberg finally returned to Malmö with the family in 1976.

It was never easy to assign works to Bertil Sjöberg, for example the Informel or the various terms of Surrealism and fantastic art. Since the artist has lived in Sweden, this has been made even more difficult by the fact that he received a variety of impulses in the city of Malmö, each of which, according to his understanding, required its own form of expression. From the end of the 1970s to the mid-1980s, Bertil Sjöberg's work, along with the “umbilical cord” to antiquity, was shaped by his boundless admiration for Henry Moore . The moor landscapes were created . In one of Moore's figures almost bursting the surface, in others they are lost in an infinitely wide landscape under the artificial light of a high sky. The Stone and Moore series exudes the peculiar atmosphere of the Stonehedges that has gripped the artist.

Malmö's parks inspired him to create a park series bathed in cold moonlight, reminiscent of the romantic poet Joseph von Eichendorff . Museum visits led to a series of oil paintings and watercolors in which oversized fossils populate dull and unreachable, frozen landscapes. The memory of Mediterranean landscapes and Spanish cities that appear deserted also influenced his work. In almost all images an amoeba-like creature appears in various stages of enlargement.

In the 1990s Bertil Sjöberg repeatedly returned to his language of the 1960s, partly, as an art critic wrote at the time, “ tachistically approximated”, partly she recalled landscapes that achieved a high degree of artificiality through painterly implementation, color and image intelligence . In the last years of his life he switched to oil pastels, which he used with incredibly strong colors.

Exhibitions

Solo and group exhibitions in Denmark, Germany, England, Holland, Spain and the USA.

His pictures are currently exhibited in:

• Aabenraa Museum, Denmark.
• Florence Museum, North Carolina, USA.
• Lunds Landsting, Lunds kommun, Sweden.
• Malmö Konstnämnd, Malmö Museum, Sweden.
• Museo D'Art Contemporani, Ibiza, Spain.
• Museumsberg Flensburg, Germany.
• Rathausgalerie Hirschberg / Bergstrasse, Germany.
• Statens Museum for Kunst , Copenhagen, Denmark.
• Municipal art gallery Mannheim , Germany.
• Svenska statens Konstfond, Sweden.

Honors and prizes

• 1952 - Danish-Swedish Culture Prize
• 1956 - Ellen Potsig's scholarship
• 1979 - Swedish State Scholarship

Web links

• Works by Bertil Sjöberg