Important Winter Sale presents Gösta Adrian-Nilsson

Bukowskis presents "Gul Figur" by Gösta Adrian-Nilsson at this season's largest live auction – Important Winter Sale.

After studying in Copenhagen and Berlin, GAN returned to Lund in August 1914. During his years abroad, he was influenced by the ideas of Cubism, Expressionism, and Futurism. Artistically renewed, he now began the purposeful work of developing his own artistic practice. Early results of the formal experiments that would characterise his subsequent production were already shown in 1915 at the exhibition Schwedische Expressionisten at Herwarth Walden's famous gallery Der Sturm in Berlin.

However, it was not until September 1916 that GAN exhibited in Stockholm for the first time, at Carl Gummeson’s gallery on Strandvägen. The following year became one of his most productive. Particularly prominent was the sailor's painting, which culminated in a series of powerful compositions at the exhibition Sailor's Compositions at Gummeson's art hall in January 1918. In his own preface to the exhibition, GAN distances himself from established labels such as Impressionism and Expressionism – or, as he writes, any "overarching -istic meaning." Today, his artistic practice clearly appears as something that eludes conventional categorisation and can only be understood on its own terms. Museum director Jan-Torsten Ahlstrand has rightly called him "the modernist pioneer from Lund."

GAN's belief in the future, despite recurring setbacks, is expressed in the concluding passage of his preface: "For if a new beauty can be won by breaking an inherited prejudice, then this prejudice shall be broken, for such is the law that the reluctant humanity has always had to be forced to listen to and – ultimately – to gratefully acknowledge as a gift."