artist: Tryggve Örn (Norwegian 1919-2017)
dimensions: 40 x 32 cm canvas size / 45 x 37 cm framed size (approx)
medium: oil on canvas
signed and dated 61
presented in its original frame
ON SALE! $645
AU $880 (approx US $635 / 560 EUROS / 73,500 yen / 465 GBP - for exact current conversion visit xe.com)
artist biography
Tryggve Henrik Örn was born September 29, 1919 in Lillehammer, Norway. He was an artist and art teacher.
He spent is childhood in Norway and in 1931 his family moved to Sweden where they settled in Hudiksvall. His father was interested in music and poetry, an interest he passed on to Tryggve. Örn moved to Stockholm when he was 17 and got a job at a radio factory and a lathe workshop. During this time he became involved in the union's educational work and became an educational leader in the union's course activities. It was the City Library's art department that sparked his interest in art, and in 1934 he bought himself paint and easels and began experimenting with painting. Örn was self taught as an artist and in the 1940s and 1950s, he took extensive art study trips to Europe, including Italy, France, Spain and the Netherlands.
Towards the end of the 1940s, he was back in Hudiksvall and had his debut exhibition there in 1946. Although Hudiksvall was a fairly small town, it had a very active art community and Örn was a central figure. During this period he and his artist colleague Tage Sahlberg took the initiative to form an art association, Hälsingland's art guild. The pair shared a strong interest in art education. In the autumn of 1951, the association arranged its first exhibition, Art in Hudiksvallshem, the first in a long running series of annual exhibitions. Örn was active as a presenter and lecturer. The art community of the post-war period flourished in Hälsingland and Hudiksvall and included names such as Carl Herman Wetterwik, Gösta and Marthe Bohm, Gotfrid Lård, Bertil Bertell, Tage Sahlberg and Mollie Faustman. It was a golden age for painting in the region.
In the 1950s, Örn worked as an art educator, first for the Swedish Association for Fine Arts, and then for Konstfrämjandet and Riksutställningar from 1957 to 1962. He moved around Sweden with travelling exhibitions that he presented. Between 1963 and 1966, he was curator of the Bollnäs Art Center. He was also active as a drawing instructor. From the 1960s until his death in 2017, Örn lived in Västerhaninge, south of Stockholm. He was awarded the Friends of La Brévière's scholarship in 1959 and a scholarship from the Swedish-Norwegian Cooperation Fund in 1962. During the 1970s he became one of the few Swedish artists to be awarded the state income guarantee for an "artistic activity of high quality and of great importance for Swedish cultural life”. He was also an engaging and insightful skilled art critic.
Örn had solo exhibitions several times in Hudiksvall, Bollnäs, Söderhamn, Iggesund and at Galerie Æsthetica in Stockholm. Alongside Tage Sahlberg, he exhibited in Hudiksvall in 1946 and with Erik Byström in Ljusdal in 1959. Beginning in the mid-1940s, he has regularly exhibited in Gävleborg County Art Association's salons in Gävle and in the Swedish General Art Association's spring salon in Stockholm in 1956. He exhibited in a number of of Liljevalch's Art Gallery's Stockholm salons. Some of his woodcuts were shown in the Folkrörelsen art promotion's traveling exhibitions.
In his paintings he often took motifs from the landscapes in Normandy and from Bohuslän. Örn was a modernist in constant development and in his work the imaginative combined with the concrete, and a gentle realism with a lyrical sense of light. In 2001 a retrospective exhibition of his work was shown at Hälsingland's museum in Hudiksvall. It was in many ways a magnificent farewell (although he returned in a group exhibition in 2007) of a career that spanned six decades. The exhibition showed how his paintings combined the free gaze of modernism with the knowledge and strong demands of tradition.
Örn is represented public collections including works held at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Hälsinglands Museum in Hudiksvall and the Skissernas (The Archive for Decorative Art) Museum in Lund. He produced some public art including a mural executed in tempera for Västra skolan in Hudiksvall.
Örn passed away on June 30, 2017 in Haninge, aged 97.
* photo - Örn (shown at left) in 1955