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14 500 SEK

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15 000 SEK

Beskrivning

PER EKSTRÖM (1944-1935): Sunset, Alvaret, Öland, signerad P. Ekström, olja på duk fäst på pannå, 43.5 x 57 cm.

PROVENIENS
Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken Samling, Stockholm
Privat samling

UTSTÄLLD
London, St. James´s, Anna Grundberg at gallery 8, Independent Finland. Gallen-Kallela and his Nordic contemporaries, 27 November-2 December 2017, No. 22


During his last year in France (where he was based from 1876-1890) Ekström was inspired by the atmospheric effects of light and sunlight. Watery sunshine through misty air, reflections, the play of light over the surface of water and transparent leaves create some of the most distinctive elements of his paintings of the period. His sketch, Sunshine Between the Trees in a Wood Forest, c. 1885 (Gothenburg Art Museum) shows an intense study of light which, in a moderated form, he revisited in his numerous paintings of flooded landscapes from his last years in France. In these paintings all the elements, water, trees, sky, are wrapped in a grey-shimmering, fiery light, which increases the mood of the image to one imbued with a mysterious silence and loneliness. A work from this series is the painting Flood. Image from Île St. Ouen, from 1889 (Prins Eugen´s Waldemarsudde, Stockholm). Prins Eugen described Ekström in a letter to his mother:

He has long been insisting on painting the sun, but preferably when it is somewhat dull. ´Only when I can do that´, he says, ´shall I start with an image of dusk or something like that, something stylishly atmospheric´. He certainly sees nature as he paints it, and would rather suffer than make any concessions to please the public.

After his return to Sweden, Ekström lived partially in Segerstad in the south-easterly part of Öland where he spent his youth, and partly in Stockholm. Encouraged by Pontus Fürstenberg, he settled in Gothenburg in 1891, but he never gave up his summer visits to Öland and in 1910 he moved back there permanently. From the 1890s the extensive landscape of southern Öland was his main subject. He continued to capture the light and the play of colour during sunrise and sunset where the sun created a near abstract form lightly indicating Öland´s open rivers and barren coast. In his penchant for the lyrical landscape Ekström set himself apart from his more realism-orientated fellow artists of the 1870s and 1880s.

Ekström rarely dated his paintings which makes it almost impossible to identify them with those in exhibition catalogues, especially when measurements were rarely included in Swedish exhibitions from the late 1800s and early 1900s. On stylistic grounds the present work is likely to have been created between 1895 and 1905.

An alvar, included in the title of the present work, is a biological environment which consists of a thin layer of vegetation on limestone soil and is, therefore, not suitable for farming. The word already had this meaning in ancient Swedish. Significantly, the largest alvar in Europe can be found on Öland and the area of ??approximately 255 square kilometers in the southern part of the island known as Stora Alvaret was, in 2000, together with the neighboring farming landscape, designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

pierre.olbers@auktionsverket.se

Konditionsrapport

Auktionsnummer:

550217

Datum:

2018-06-18