10. SIGRID HJERTÉN. Monastery Portal, Palermo.

Oil on canvas, 92 x 73 cm, including frame 107 x 87.5 cm. Signed Hjertén.
On verso marked 162.

PROVENANCE
Private collection, Sweden
Nordéns aukter, nr 27, 20 November 1997, cat no. He's 86.

A sea of light and color dances across the canvas in the “Monastery Portal, Palermo”. Through Sigrid Hjertén's vibrant brushstrokes and expressive color palette, a dreamlike passage into a sun-warmed monastery opens up. The red and white columns frame the composition and direct the viewer's gaze towards a courtyard where arcades and ceilings shift in golden yellow and sky blue tones. Light streams through the stage, breaking against stone and foliage, and transforming the architecture into a vivid play of shadows and reflections.
The lush plants, painted in a swirling movement of green and blue hues, contrast with the solid, architectural and reinforce the sense of a place that balances between order and spontaneity. A floral wreath of warm pink and yellow tones illuminates the foreground like a visual explosion of life. Hjertén's characteristic brushstroke gives the painting an energy that seems to vibrate on the border between the figurative and the abstract. Palermo, with its southern Italian light and its history of encounters of different cultures, becomes here a stage where architecture and nature intertwine in an almost musical flow.

Sigrid Hjertén's stay in Sicily in the autumn and winter of 1934—1935 was a time of inspiration but also of fragile fragility. Together with her husband Isaac Grünewald and son Iván, she travelled around Italy, eventually arriving in Sicily, where she was joined by her friend Britta von Horn. After years of turbulence, both in personal and artistic life, Sicily became a haven where she found her creative joy. Together the two girlfriends made excursions, and Hjertén painted more and more frantically, and the paintings were executed with brushstrokes that can be likened to a kind of paint scheme over the canvas.

On the island, Hjertén was seduced by the southern light and intense colors, which seem to have dissolved the contours of her painting and gave her palette an even warmer and more glowing tone. The Arab-Norman architecture of Palermo, with its rich ornaments and deep arches, became a perfect fund for her experiments with color and form. Her brushstrokes became more sweeping and expressive, almost feverish, as if she wanted to capture Sicily's rhythm and atmosphere on canvas before it disappeared.

But while Sicily offered a creative breathing space, Hjertén struggled with an inner turmoil. Her mental health had already begun to falter, and within a few years her illness would eclipse her life increasingly. Yet the paintings from this period, such as the “Monastery Portal, Palermo”, are filled with light, warmth and vibrancy — like a last burst of creativity before darkness took over. Here we find a painting in which color guides the experience, where the sun is almost felt on the skin and where, if you listen carefully, you can sense the murmur of a distant monastery garden — a moment of stillness captured in Hjertén's delicate vibrating brushstrokes.