Åke Göransson

The Gothenburg Colourist with a dark glow.

Åke Göransson painted people and landscapes in dark, glowing colours. He spent his last years in a psychiatric hospital.

Åke Göransson was born in 1902 and worked in Gothenburg. He studied at the Valand School of Art in Gothenburg under Tor Bjurström, the same teacher most of the Gothenburg Colourists had. He exhibited very little in his lifetime and was almost unknown to the wider public.

Göransson led an isolated life, for many years with his mother, and worked in straitened circumstances. He painted people at home, portraits, female figures and landscapes from Gothenburg and its surroundings. His colours are dark and glowing, often blue, red and violet, and the figures have a serious, still and almost sacred presence. The forms are simplified and the outlines heavy.

In the last years of his life he was cared for in a psychiatric hospital because of mental illness, and he no longer painted. His artistic output is therefore confined to a fairly short period.

Only after he fell ill did his art receive serious attention, through exhibitions in Gothenburg and Stockholm. Today he is regarded as one of the most powerful and enigmatic Swedish painters of the interwar years, and his art has been compared with that of Edvard Munch and Ernst Josephson. The Gothenburg Museum of Art has a large collection of his works.

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