Adam Saks’ visual idiom is expressive, powerful and personal, all at the same time. A tough masculine, military or marine context is often poised against an exposed sense of loneliness. Saks’s work is rich in charged symbols. He explores questions relating to masculinity, sexuality, violence and death, but also to love. His work frequently deals with differing approaches to themes of respect and honour, deriving inspiration at times from the codes and tales of the French Foreign Legion. His early works are pregnant with atmosphere, delicate and sensitive. Later Adam Saks moves towards a darker palette, his colours becoming rich and mellow. His pictures vibrate with tones of icy blue, ochre and violet. His watercolours rebut the common view of watercolours being only small scale. For him, watercolour is not merely a matter of upholding tradition but first and foremost one of experimentation.

More works by the artist

trader, 2007

Adam Saks

Art and nature are siblings, branches of the same tree, writes John Fowles in The Tree (1978). This approach fits well with the creative work of Andreas Eriksson. Nature is his constant source of inspiration and trees have long been one of his recurring themes. Andreas Eriksson received his training at the Konsthögskolan in Stockholm. His artistic range is wide, working in painting, photography, sculpture and graphic art. This was well displayed for instance at the 2011 Venice Biennial, where he and Fia Backström together represented Sweden. When confronted with his watercolours we are reminded of how small we are in comparison to nature and how distant art can sometimes appear. The smallest woodland grove and the least pretentious work of art hide and guard their secrets.

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Andreas Eriksson

Anna Bengtsson studied at KV Konstskola in Gothenburg and the Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm. She is an illustrator, graphic designer and writer of both children’s books and fiction. Her focus is on creating images. Although Bengtsson frequently uses pastel crayons, tempera and watercolour, most of her works are made with acrylics and digital editing. In Vildvinter ("Wild Winter", 1999) Anna Bengtsson has illustrated Anna-Karin Palm’s texts. The book is about snow leopards that climb down from their trees as the winter’s night descends on Vitabergsparken in Stockholm. They whirl through the city, in the blinking, yellow lights from the snow ploughs, just before dawn, when they one more return to sleep in the tree tops in the park.

More works by the artist, from the book Vildvinter ("Wild winter")

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Anna Bengtsson

Landscapes were central to Arne Isacsson's (1917–2010) work. He often worked on thin sheets of paper and employed a classic style of watercolour painting. Throughout his life, however, he experimented with the actual technique and created watercolour monotypes, in which the image arises during the pigment’s encounter with water and a special, thin paper. Arne Isacsson became famous not only for his paintings, but also for his interest in materials. For many decades, he explored how the quality of paint changes with copious amounts of water and studied the reactions of paper to pigment and moisture. He was a professor of watercolour technique, a famous educator, and authored textbooks on oil and watercolour techniques. Arne Isacsson founded the Gerlesborg School of Fine Art.

Arne Isacsson, Landscape from Iceland, 2001

Arne Isacsson, Höst Lye, 1999.jpg

Arne Isacsson

Carin Ellberg is a story-teller who creates her own pictorial worlds. Characteristic of her style is the use of a slim, meandering line that winds its ornamental way. And in her installations it is the nylon pantyhose that plays the same role. Self-portraits and female figures are recurring themes in Ellberg’s work. Trees have a special significance in her iconography. Thoughts sprout like thick branches from human heads. Her works are also full of attributes conventionally associated with femininity: handbags, clothes, hair arrangements and sweets. Her palette is dominated by tones of varying pink and beige. She is interested in aspects of everyday aesthetics, where reality and dream merge undramatically and effortlessly but with the magic charm of fairy tale.

Carin Ellberg, and hid my intentions., 2007–2009

carin ellberg, but just touch., 2007–09

Carin Ellberg, Weather Report, 2004.jpg

Carin Ellberg

Carl Wargh has both practical and the study of art behind him. During the 1950s and 1960s, he studied at the Finnish Art Academy School (currently The Academy of Fine Arts) in Helsinki and was a painting student of expressionist Oskar Kokoschka in Salzburg. Carl Wargh works primarily intuitively and with improvisation. His art captures us with shifts in perspective and unexpected compositions. The images are often produced with combinations of thin pencil drawing with watercolours. The paint flows, not freely however, but controlled by extremely economical use of water. With the help of collage technique Carl Wargh builds up pictures with leftover material from his studio. He focuses on the base colour’s contrast effect and creates relief-like effects in his paintings.

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Carl Wargh

Cecilia Edefalk’s big breakthrough came with the noted series En annan rörelse (Another Movement) in 1990. This suite of pictures focused on the relationship between original and copy. It proved to be a significant contribution to the Swedish debate on post-modernist pictorial idioms. Cecilia Edefalk’s production is extensive. She works with photography, sculpture and painting. In her watercolours she ranges between razor-sharp and softer forms. Her images often have to do with other pictures. The same subject is repeated but at the same time transformed during the artistic process. Important themes in her art are self-portraits and interpretations of antique sculpture, along with an interest in the mystical and the occult.

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Cecilia Edefalk

Eva Lindström studied at Västerås Art School and the University of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm. She is both an illustrator and author. In the 1980s, she began working as a cartoonist, for example for the women’s magazine Q and Arbetaren (The Worker). She gradually began illustrating and writing children’s books. Lindström’s style leans towards charged states of being and strong emotions. Thematically, she alternates between the most mundane and deeply existential issues. She works in watercolour, gouache and pencil. She has contributed to Kamratposten (a Swedish magazine for children) and created short animated cartoons, and several of her stories have been turned into films. Eva Lindström has been nominated for the August Prize for her children’s books many times, and she has received numerous awards.

Eva Lindström, ur boken Jag rymmer, 2006

Eva Lindström

Fredrik Söderberg’s watercolours teem with beautiful details forming a magnificent whole. His references come partly from antiquity and from biblical stories, and partly from other artists fascinated by both line and darkness: Albrecht Dürer, William Blake and Aubrey Beardsley, but also from the medieval-inspired William Morris – foreground figure in the British Arts and Crafts Movement. With reference to the spiritual and the occult, to alchemy and astrology, Söderberg creates exact symmetrical compositions reminiscent of both the Tibetan mandala and precise architectural sketches of facades and temples. His paintings are imbued with mysticism. In the fine ornamentation, the silver leaf, the gold and the colour-bands the figurative meets the abstract. Matter meets the spirit.

Fredrik Söderberg, Der traum V / The dream V, 2013

Fredrik Söderberg, Das haus C.G. Jung mit geist / The house of C.G. Jung with spirit, 2013

Fredrik Söderberg

Gunilla Bergström has been one of Sweden’s leading picture book creators through the years. ”I’ll darn well draw the soul!” This audacious thought was the beginning of some 40 children’s books with unforgettable characters who she still writes and illustrates to this day. But without comparison, it is Alfons Åberg who has become the most famous of Gunilla Bergström’s figures. With a singular colour palette, precise lines and expert compositions, Gunilla Bergström shapes credible environments, placing her figures in a daily life that we can easily recognise. The questions asked are existential and applicable at all ages. Isolation. Fear. Vulnerability. The various facets of friendship. The unexpected complications of family life. The universal principles of happiness. Internal and external life. Appreciating the little things. These form the foundation of Gunilla Bergström’s imagery. The books about Alfons Åberg have been translated into some thirty languages and comprise the majority of Gunilla Bergström’s production.

Gunilla Bergström, Alfons och hemlige Mållgan, 1976.jpg

Gunilla Bergström

Hafsteinn Austmann was born in Vopnafjörður in 1934 and grew up in the capital Reykjavik. He was very young when he decided to devote himself to art, and after studying visual arts and crafts at art schools in Iceland, he also studied in Paris at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. He was early fascinated by French abstract art and was invited to exhibit at the international Réalités Nouvelles salon, only twenty years old. To date, Austmann has had about 30 separate exhibitions and participated in a large number of exhibitions around the world. His work is also found at all major museums in Scandinavia. Hafsteinn Austmann has for decades worked alternately with watercolors, acrylic paints and oil paints. The Nordic Watercolour Museum’s collection holds 10 watercolors painted by Austmann between 1958–1960.

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Hafsteinn Austmann

In her 1998 watercolour suite Family Album ("Perhealbumista"), Kati Immonen traces her private life and the conventions and traditions within her closest family. A child is seen blowing out a candle on a birthday cake, another plays with a toboggan. A baby is bathed and Father Christmas stands waiting by the Christmas tree. In a series of some thirty watercolours Immonen has paraphrased black and white family photos in which everyday life and celebration have been preserved as indelible memories. In Immonen’s work, however, these memories are presented in pale pastel monochrome. The artist exploits the transparent qualities of watercolour to give each scene its own special nuance: pale pink, blue and green for instance. The past returns in rainbow colours.

Kati Immonen, from the series Family Album, 1998

More works by the artists, from the series Family Album

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Kati Immonen

Knutte Wester works with video, sculpture, drawing and installations. He graduated from the Umeå Academy of Fine Arts in 2003 and has participated in group and solo exhibitions all over the world including Moscow, Johannesburg and Stockholm. Knutte Wester’s works are often underpinned by documentary elements. He is a storyteller, who uses an unassuming approach to reveal injustices, abuse of power and social problems. He often lends his voice to people in need and those who find it hard to make themselves heard.

Knutte Wester, from A Bastard Child, 2007–2015

More works by the artist, from the series/movie A Bastard Child (2016)

Knutte Wester, ur Horungen, 2007–2015.jpg

Knutte Wester

The watercolours of Lars Lerin, with their masterly intimations of obscurity, resemble some invocation. His work is an endless repetition of the same theme. His pictures etch themselves upon the memory, though they contain no exceptional features. The viewer’s gaze wanders across detail after detail: the facades of buildings, trunks of birch trees, patches of snow, abandoned farmyards and industrial towns. The cool of the Lofoten Islands and the heat of India. The Värmland forests of his childhood and the unexplored stretches of Iran. The nearby and the distant share the same space. Lerin travels the world but his foreign visits imply only one more homecoming. The true distance is that between the anonymous, faceless figures who people the Lerin landscape. His pictures give body to sensations rather than depicting the real world. The work of Lars Lerin has been published in some fifty books with his own texts and works of art.

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Lars Lerin

Atmospherically, Leiko Ikemura’s art is naturally reminiscent of surrealist Odilon Redon, German expressionists and Louise Bourgeois’ trendsetting work. But Ikemura has found her own magical style – dreamy, poetic and vibrating with subtle metamorphoses as if nothing were fixed, as if all things were constantly in the process of becoming, of transforming. Over time she began to return to her Japanese roots, where the soul of nature thrives in daylight and the darkness of night. Ikemura’s enigmatic work portrays strange beings, animals, plants, minerals and architectural details that melt together and gradually morph as the image emerges. A characteristic Japanese sense of the spirit of nature, which inspires everything, echoes throughout Ikemura’s artistic world. Transformations are a primary focus in everything she creates.

Leiko Ikemura, Red Tree and Yellow Cloud, 2013

Leiko Ikemura, Aqua, 2007

Leiko Ikemura

Peaceful desolation creates a saturated atmosphere in the imagery of photographer Lennart Alves. His love of nature is tangible, with a focus on landscapes as he explores vision and visual techniques. The Seascape series was created at the Nordic Watercolour Museum when Alves lived and worked in one of the guest studios on Bockholmen. The images comprise a sort of ocean landscape, painted with the sea itself. The saltwater has left sparkling crystals on the surface of the paper. Although a camera was not used to create these images, they allude to the photographic development process, in which the image appears as the paper is soaked in various baths.

Lennart Alves, Seascapes, 2005.jpg

Lennart Alves

The flow of watercolour is Maria Nordin’s true element. She began painting when she was 22, first in oils and acrylic, but changed to the medium of watercolour. Her preference is for large format images, flowing colours and clearly applied colours. Her best known works are intimate depictions of human beings with vividly pink skin tones. The backgrounds are reduced. The bodies she presents seem as if cast into empty space and captured in mid-movement. Her series Pink Noise consists of facial portraits that are so harshly trimmed that it is almost impossible to tell if they represent men or women. In Nordin’s pictures there is both fragility and firmness, precision and freedom. The delightful and the disagreeable share equal status in a distinctive idiom that strives to steer away from the sickly sweet towards the strange and weird.

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Maria Nordin

In the paintings of Martin Jacobson myths meet and mingle. The intensity of his colours reinforces the sense of dream and unreality. He finds his sources of inspiration in abandoned pictorial material, in old book and magazine illustrations from the late 19th century. He recycles them, picking apart and reassembling disparate pictorial elements, then drawing and painting them in Indian ink and colour. Thus he slowly constructs his own fantasy worlds. Martin Jacobsson reflects in the art of man’s place in the world and the existential questions of human life. He is educated at Malmö Art Acadamy.

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Martin Jacobson

Mats Gustafson has a special feeling for the fleeting character of watercolour. His career started in the late 1970s working on commissions as an international fashion illustrator. In time he made his name even in the artistic arena. Gustafson moves freely between fashion illustrations, landscape painting and erotically charged studies. His subjects appear simple: conifers and boulders in the countryside, deer, ageing faces and nudes. His basic aim is, however, to capture beauty in all its varying forms. His artistic idiom is both elegant and subtle, with no room for error in his brushwork. Light and shade are distributed rhythmically across the paper, the colours merging together to form a body.

Mats Gustafson, Sten 31, 2002.jpg

Mats Gustafson

Since the 1980s Michael Kvium has developed a personal style and iconography, influenced by the great Spanish masters, Diego Velázquez and Francisco de Goya. Characteristic of Kvium’s art is a distinctive palette of dark grey and brown tones, though in his watercolours he often prefers brighter colours than in his oil paintings. Flora Danica consists of hundreds of daring portraits in which colour and psychology combine. Repetition is used as stylistic technique. The series lays bare man’s existential loneliness, his thirst for love, his vanity and his sense of lost orientation. The backgrounds are simple, beautiful expanses of colour. His expressive idiom is intense. Gravity and empathy mingle with humour. The robust and the tender are joined in successful union. Small scale works are linked up to a series where the final effect is overwhelming.

Artists