INGE SCHIÖLER. "Summer at Koster".

Signed and dated Inge Schiöler 1958. Oil on canvas, 62x74 cm. A verso No. 999 in Gunnar Hjortén's list.

PROVENANCE: Nordén Auctions, catalog number 117. Auction No. 6, 24 March 1993.

Inge Schiöler's (1908-1971) painting was powerful and intuitive, an explosion of colors handled with rough brush strokes. It appears that he rarely or never planned his subjects with sketches. Instead, he painted directly on location, in nature, with the canvas leaning against something or laid on the ground.

Schiöler is counted together with Ivan Ivarson, Ragnar Sandberg, Nils Nilsson and Åke Göranson among others among the so-called Gothenburg colorists. They never appeared as a formal group and were stylistically different among themselves, but with the commonality that most of them studied under Tor Bjurström at Valand's art school during the 1920s and expressed themselves with an intense color language where nature was the motif but the form was stated more summarily.

During a period in Stockholm, Inge Schiöler came into contact with artists such as Gideon Börje, Albin Amelin, Bror Hjorth, Sven Erixson, Otte Sköld and Hilding Linnqvist. In 1932 he held his first solo exhibition. But the increased work pace, irregular habits and financial worries worsened both Schiöler's physical and mental health. The family made sure he came home to Strömstad. In the fall of 1933, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and admitted to St. Jörgen's mental hospital at Hisingen in Gothenburg, a stay that lasted until 1960.

Inge Schiöler's breakthrough came paradoxically with a large retrospective exhibition in 1938 during his darkest period at St. Jörgen. There, it took nine more or less apathetic years before he approached painting again, first tentatively on toilet paper, sheets and walls but with time more and more fully. The supervised leaves became important. They only lasted a few days, but under the open sky on the west coast, Schiöler painted with manic energy.

Towards the end of the 1950s, the family bought a summer cottage for him in Sydkoster. It became his artistic base for the rest of his life. He never had a studio, but painted outdoors and only in the summer, but in the house he could hang the paintings to dry, cook fish gratin, smoke a cigarette.

Inge Schiöler was a child of nature. It was his element even as a child. He worked explosively, could complete several works a day, plowed with the brush in the glossy oil paint - or "carved with the paint" as he himself said. He painted the landscapes on the Koster Islands he couldn't live without. The glowing red houses, the deep blue water, the flaming bursts of color against the barren granite, the endless flickering light and the soft poetry of summer vegetation.

Immersed in the life-affirming world he depicted, he was happy.