Gösta Adrian-Nilsson

The painting White Circle. Horizontal belongs to the few works created during GAN's plane geometric period. It was executed in the important year of 1930, when the Art Concret movement culminated in Sweden in connection with the Stockholm Exhibition. Inspired by Otto G. Carlsund and French concretism, GAN distanced himself from representational art and quickly aligned with the theoretical foundation of the movement. The artists sought a new visual language, liberated from both representational and abstract motifs, and aimed to create an autonomous reality in their works through the use of plane geometric forms that they perceived as universal. A painting should not symbolise or mean anything other than itself. The artists asserted that the work was thus not abstract but concrete, since "nothing is more concrete, more real, than a line, a colour, a surface."

These ideas were in line with GAN's theosophically inspired writing The Divine Geometry (1922), where he describes art as a manifestation of eternal and universal laws.

GAN was directly connected to the ideas behind Art Concret for a brief period, from 1929 to 1931. At the Stockholm Exhibition in 1930, he participated with five plane geometric paintings, Composition I–V, executed in the same year. In the mid-1930s, GAN turned towards surrealism and exhibited with the Halmstad Group at the Gothenburg Art Hall in 1936, as well as participating in the international exhibitions Cubism–Surrealism in Copenhagen in 1935 and Surrealism in the North in Lund in 1937.

The auction's plane geometric work White Circle. Horizontal was previously part of Captain Dani Liebenfeld's art collection in Norrköping. The city has had strong ties to concretism in several ways. Here, the artists Otto G. Carlsund and Erik Chambert grew up, and here lived and worked the significant art collectors Dani Liebenfeld and Kurt von Schmalensee. The Norrköping Art Museum early on incorporated concrete art into its permanent collections and has organised several special exhibitions on the theme over the years.

Liebenfeld, who was also a hotel director and owner of the Standard Hotel in Norrköping, was one of the first in Sweden to collect modernist art. As early as 1919, he acquired his first painting by GAN, despite both friends and contemporaries often perceiving this art as difficult or provocative. Dani Liebenfeld later donated several works from his collection to the Norrköping Museum.