Olle Baertling was an eccentric but also an innovator in both Swedish and international art. The large number of exhibitions around the world that Baertling participated in over the years attests to the fact that he managed to make a name for himself abroad even during his lifetime. It was not until the 1960s that Baertling began to gain serious recognition in his home country of Sweden. During this time, he also collaborated on major projects with leading architects of the day, such as Peter Celsing in the Kulturhuset and David Helldén in Hötorgscity and Frescati.

After starting to paint in a figurative style in the 1930s, alongside his work as a bank clerk, he arrived in Paris in 1948 and studied there with André Lhote and Fernand Léger. Baertling maintained good contacts with Paris and soon became involved with the group around the gallerist Denise René. After 1950, Baertling completely abandoned representational painting to devote himself to concrete art. It was also during the 1950s that he found his style, which he would work on and develop for the rest of his life. Gradually, Baertling came to refer to his compositional system as open form.

The definition of open form is that every part of the composition extends to the edge of the frame. The black diagonals thus create free colour fields that, with the help of the viewer, can continue beyond the painting's picture plane and create an illusion of movement. Ideally, Baertling believed that the works should hang without a frame, or with a transparent plastic strip, so that the effect would be even clearer. The surfaces can be seen as background or foreground depending on the viewer's free choice. The non-representational aspect of the painting was reinforced by his choice of colours. He deliberately mixed the colours so that they could not be associated with anything representational. Blue was not to resemble water or sky, green was not to resemble grass, and so on. The lines are always black; according to Baertling, black was the most abstract colour upon which all his art was built. The force of the various colour fields never crosses the black line; instead, it bounces back.