Olle Bonniér – Modernist and Avant-Gardist

Olle Bonniér is currently featured in a highly praised retrospective exhibition at the Norrköping Art Museum, running until 22 February 2026.

Bonniér was born in 1925 in California, USA. He came to Sweden as a five-year-old in 1930 and passed away in Stockholm in 2016. From an early age, he knew he wanted to become an artist, and one of his first mentors was Gustaf Fjaestad, whom he met in Värmland. In 1941, Bonniér began studying at the Technical School, today known as Konstfack, and later continued as a private student under Isaac Grünewald. After the end of the Second World War, in 1945, Bonniér set out on study trips across Europe, often walking long distances to learn from the masters of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

Bonniér expressed himself through his art in a non-figurative manner and was interested in the dynamics of colour and form. He had his major breakthrough with the exhibition Young Art at Färg och Form, where the radical young artists of the time united in an intellectual group known as the “Men of 1947”. The name was somewhat misleading as it excluded the only female artist in the exhibition, Randi Fisher. Other participants included Lennart Rodhe, Karl-Axel Pehrson, Pierre Olofsson, Olle Gill, Lage Lindell, Armand Rossander, and Uno Vallman, as well as the sculptors Liss Eriksson and Knut Erik Lindberg. A handful of participants focused on purely concretist art, Bonniér being one of them. The exhibition broadly launched concrete art in Sweden, and Bonniér became one of its leading figures. Initially, he painted in vibrant colours, later shifting to more contrasting palettes, often black and white. During the 1950s, Bonniér moved towards a more poetic style of painting. Olle Bonniér is undoubtedly one of Sweden’s foremost representatives of concretism and was very important to the Swedish art scene in the post-war period.

Viewing: September 15–19, Berzelii Park 1, Stockholm
Open: 11 AM – 5 PM