Erik Olson

The most religious modernist of the Halmstad Group.

Erik Olson was one of the founders of the Halmstad Group in 1929. He painted Cubist and Surrealist pictures and later religious subjects.

Erik Olson was born in Halmstad in 1901. Together with his brother Axel Olson and four other young artists from the town, he founded the Halmstad Group in 1929, one of the longest-lived artists' groups in Swedish art history. In the 1920s he spent time in Paris, where he was influenced by Cubism and by Fernand Léger.

In the group's early years he worked on Cubist and Constructivist pictures with clear, geometric forms. In the 1930s the Halmstad Group became the leading representative of Surrealism in Sweden. Erik Olson then painted enigmatic landscapes with solitary objects and figures in a harsh light, influenced by de Chirico and Dalí. The group caused a stir with its exhibitions, and Olson was one of its most active theorists.

After the Second World War his art changed. He turned increasingly to religious and spiritual subjects, and colour and light took on a larger role in his pictures. He also made public art and church art.

Erik Olson died in 1986. The art of the Halmstad Group is now collected at the Mjellby Art Museum outside Halmstad. He is regarded as one of the most important representatives of Swedish Surrealism and Swedish interwar modernism.

• The interwar years
• The 1930s: colourists and Surrealists