What a wonderful initiative by the Swedish Institute to entrust Marion Alluchon and Marjolaine Lévy with curating an exhibition dedicated to the painter and sculptor Olle Bærtling (1911–1981)! In France, until recently, only the Lahumière and Denise René galleries offered, on rare occasions, the chance to see his works. It is therefore a real pleasure to discover, gathered in one place, so many paintings by this artist who came to art as a self-taught artist in the mid-1930s, while he was employed at the Scandinavian Bank in Stockholm. Considered one of the leading figures of Swedish geometric abstraction, Olle Bærtling gradually moved toward radical abstraction following several stays in Paris in the 1940s and 1950s. After spending time in the studios of André Lhote and Fernand Léger, he had a decisive encounter with Auguste Herbin, an ardent advocate of this movement within the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, as well as with Nicolas Schöffer and Victor Vasarely. Like them, he aspired to give abstract art a spatial, even architectural, dimension, and as such was active within the Espace group, founded in 1951 by André Bloc and Félix Del Marle, with the aim of reconciling the visual arts, architecture, and urban planning.

Excerpt from an article by Domitille d'Orgeval published in issue No. 117 of the magazine Art Absolument.

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