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BIRGER ALSIÖ

February 2023
Preview 22.01.2023 17:00


Birger Alsiö's universe was his own (1941 – 2021). There he was a scientist "in several fields" and also an artist, in both cases self-taught.
 
He was born in 1941 in Falun, Sweden and lived most of his life in Uppsala, Sweden. After a few professional years, he took early retirement in 1969 with a diagnosis of schizophrenia and paranoia. It gave him space to immerse himself in art, even though he saw himself primarily as a distinguished scientist.
 
Birger Alsiö acquired himself via lectures and his personal university, consisting of large amounts of books on popular science and art and also fiction. But aside from any patent applications, he kept his work to himself.  Every single work of art he produced – hundreds of drawings, paintings and sculptures – is described and catalogued.
 
Under the heading: "My artistic development from the beginning" Birger Alsiö talked about the works, accepted and peculiar methods and sources of inspiration of Artists such as Mondrian and Baertling. He remembers "a watercolor painting of a two-deck ship of the line from the time of the Napoleonic Wars, seen obliquely from the stern" he did as a child for an exhibition together with other school children. He never came to show more than that. He decided early on to keep all the originals. He gave away some "replicas" for birthdays and other occasions, but the quality of the unbroken originals became his life's work.

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Without title- 31,00 x 39,50 cm Markers on paper 1981

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