Bertil Öhlund studied in Paris in the early 1950s at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and under André Lhote. In January 1957, he made his debut at Galerie Creutze with 34 works of art. The exhibition attracted the attention of several art critics in Paris, who praised Öhlund and his Neoplastic and non-figurative painting. They found Öhlund’s work to be in the same style as that of the internationally established artists Vasarely and Herbin, while also influenced by the Swedish artist Olle Baertling, who was much talked about in Paris at the time. It is primarily for the large concrete paintings from the late 1950s that Bertil Öhlund occupies a place in Swedish art history. In the 1960s, he turned to a more figurative form of painting, which could not match the dynamism he had succeeded in conveying in the 1950s. Olle Baertling and Bertil Öhlund are the only Swedish concrete artists to have established themselves in Paris and beyond Sweden.