LAMBERT WERNER (1900-1983), Figure, signed and dated 'Lambert Werner 49, mixed media.

approx. 56x73 cm
frame 72x91 cm

PLAYER IN THE INTERNATIONAL ARENA
Lambert Werner's distinctive artistry belongs to one of the 20th century Swedish art
internationally most successful. His earliest artistic impressions he received at the age of 17
Gösta Adrian-Nilsson's dynamic art, but it was through contact with Kandinsky and
Klee in 1920s Berlin, where Lambert Werner studied for three years to become a doctor, as his
artistic vision was freed and he completely switched to painting.

He also experimented coincidentally with sculpture under the influence of Archipenko and Zadkine. After his studies in Berlin, he moved his business to Paris, where in 1928 he made his debut at Galerie Mots et Images with some ten lyrical abstractions. Lambert Werner was an independent artist, who for a long time followed his own path closely connected with international art currents.
Kandinsky's color-musical abstractions and Klee's subtle pictorial poetry seem to have been the primary starting points, when, partly also under the influence of international surrealism, he designed his refined and personal neosurrealism.

Of Swedish artists, he seems to be closest to the Scanian Imaginists who were prominent at about the same time as him; his technique of automatism, his sometimes poetically charged titles and the almost oriental splendor of colour with which he often drowns his images — and which has led some to compare him to Max Walter Svanberg — suggest a certain affinity with these, but he is too individualist to be bound to any one. direction.
The complicated mixed technique of scrapings, washings, frottages and lasers, which is his hallmark and gives his watercolours and gouaches their peculiar appearance with their somewhat batik-like lustre, must obviously bring a certain degree of calculation in the artistic approach and therefore precludes pure automatism.

In most of Lambert Werner's paintings before the mid-1950s there is a difficult to decipher, but still
clear figurative symbolism, which speaks of deep artistic awareness. When the informal
art broke through during the 1950s the step was not far for him from his surrealistically visionary art to a purely nonfigurative pictorial vision with its closest roots in the calligraphic fantasies of French Tachism and play with plumps and stains. The question is whether, through this liberation from lingering figurative remnants, he finally arrived at an adequate expression of his artistic intentions: to create a “pure” art, which, like music, is itself enough without any literary determinations, an art which intends to free the viewer's imagination by excluding any fixation on definite things. Consequently, since the mid-1950s, he refrained from giving his paintings any names.

Lambert Werner had solo exhibitions in Stockholm at Färg och Form in 1949, 1951, 1955,
1960 and 1966, Sturegalleriet 1959, Galleri Observatorium och Sveagalleriet 1962, Galleri
Latina 1965, in Gothenburg at Lorensbergs kunstsalong 1949, 1951, 1954, 1958, 1962 and 1966, in Norrköping 1953 and 1956, in Borås 1953, Örebro 1954, Malmö 1955, Jönköping 1956,
Västerås 1957 and Landskrona 1959. He participated in Paris in the Salon des Surindépendants 1950
and showed separate collections at Galerie Raymond Creuze in 1951, 1953, 1955 and 1958.
Further he had solo exhibitions in Basel in 1951, Berlin in 1952 and 1953, Brussels and Lucerne
1953, Traunstein 1956, Oslo 1957, Nuremberg 1958, Wuppertal-Barmen 1959-62, Amsterdam
1961, New York 1964 and numerous exhibitions in Italy during the 1960s.

Represented: Moderna museet, Borås Art Museum, Jönköping Museum, Västerås
art museum and Örebro county museum as well as abroad in Institut Tessin and
The Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris, the Nationalgalerie Berlin and the museums of Nuremberg and Wuppertal.