Scandinavian abstract art: what abstraction looks like in the North

Ishtar Bäcklund Dakhil's Desert Circles is filed under Abstract, and look closely and it's full of cacti. Rust-coloured rocks, dusty pink hills, little green plants: the makings of a perfectly ordinary desert view. What makes it abstract is what's laid over the top. A run of overlapping white circles cuts the landscape into curved pieces, and from across a room you read the geometry first and the desert second.

That gap is worth a few hundred words: what abstraction means in a Nordic idiom, and what it means in most people's heads.

The abstraction most people picture

Say "abstract art" and the image that arrives is usually mid-century New York. Big canvases, poured paint and floating fields, Pollock and Rothko, and a deliberate break with the visible world. That version made abstraction famous, and it set the terms while it was at it: to be abstract is to have no subject.

The North never really signed up to that.

Nordic abstraction kept the subject

The region has a decent claim on the origin story. Hilma af Klint painted her first abstract picture in a Stockholm studio in 1906, five years before Kandinsky claimed the same first for himself, and by her death in 1944 she hadn't exhibited a single one of them (Tate tells it well). Even so, af Klint's abstractions are diagrams. She was trying to set down a reality she believed was genuinely there, not empty the picture out.

Norway's abstract painters, when they arrived, did much the same. Jakob Weidemann (1923 to 2001) pioneered abstract painting in Norway in the decades after the Second World War, and his mature work gets described as abstract expressionism with nature as its basis. His best-known pictures are the skogbunnbilder, the forest floor paintings, shown at Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo in 1961: abstract, and also unmistakably a long look at the ground in a Norwegian wood. His contemporary Gunnar S. Gundersen (1921 to 1983) pushed nearer to pure form, debuting in 1947 and quickly counted among the leaders of abstract art in Norway, building his pictures out of flat fields of colour.

Flat fields of colour. Hold onto that one.

The other half of the story was printed

Painting's only half of it. Nordic abstraction had its widest life on cloth and paper. Maija Isola (1927 to 2001) made around 500 patterns for Marimekko across forty years, simple, bold, flat patterns printed at a dramatic scale, and her Unikko poppy of 1964 is the one everybody can picture: a flower cut back to a few flat shapes and blown up until the size does half the work. Marimekko's Finnish rather than Scandinavian strictly, but the instinct is regional. Reduce the motif, flatten the colour, repeat it.

The other thing behind the look is the stencil. A screenprint starts by cutting a shape out of paper, laying it over the mesh and pulling ink across it, and a cut edge can't describe anything: no modelling, no brushwork, no visible hand. It gives you silhouette, and then everything rests on whether the silhouette reads.

Put the two halves together and you've got the tension running through the whole tradition: folk pattern on one side, all repetition and ornament, modernist reduction on the other, stripping back until only the essential is left. Print is where the two meet. The folk end of that story, the rosemaling and the painted chests, sits in what is Scandinavian art if you want the longer history first.

So what does it actually look like

Four habits, if you want a shorthand.

• Flat colour rather than built-up paint. One ground, a figure or two on it, and the join between them left crisp.
• Shape carrying the whole picture. No modelling, no depth, no brushstroke to admire.
• A motif you can still name. A bird, a body, water, a flower. Abstracted, not abandoned.
• Restraint about how much. Two colours where four were available.

Which is why it hangs so easily in an ordinary room. This is abstraction that was always meant for a wall someone lives in front of, rather than a museum atrium.

How the gallery's own abstracts read against that

There are four prints on our abstract page, by two Swedish artists who get there from opposite ends.

Ishtar Bäcklund Dakhil, in Stockholm, paints her originals by hand in watercolour, natural pigments and mixed media, and she brings the geometry with her. In Desert Circles the circles sit over the landscape like a set of lenses, and each segment holds a slightly different patch of desert. Month of May does the same thing to a garden: lilacs, bees and yellow flowers gather round a fine geometric star, with a ring of pale circles pulling the whole picture into a pattern against a soft pink sky. Folk ornament and modernist structure in one frame, which is the tension above, solved by putting both in.

Markus Naarttijärvi is a documentary photographer in Umeå, and he doesn't add the geometry. He finds it. Frozen Currents is shot so close to the ice that there's no horizon and no sense of scale, just pale ridges turning through dark water in blue-grey, white and near-black. Sun Over the Forest is the nearest thing in the gallery to a colour-field picture: an orange sky, a low disc crossed by thin cloud, and the forest reduced to a black band along the bottom. Nothing in either has been made up. The camera's been pointed at the moment the subject stops explaining itself.

They don't all tick the first habit, and it's worth being straight about that. Ishtar's surfaces are painted, with uneven colour and scattered marks, and a photograph of ice is never flat. Restraint varies too: Sun Over the Forest is close to three colours, while Month of May is a whole garden. The middle two hold for all four, though. Shape carries the picture, and the subject is still there to name.

If the word's been putting you off

It puts plenty of people off, and fairly: abstract art has a reputation for asking you to work. Nothing here does. Every one of these prints is a recognisable thing, a desert, a garden, ice on dark water, a low sun over a forest, simplified or framed until the shape does the talking, which is a much older northern habit than the word suggests.

Practically, they suit a room that's already close to calm: one confident piece on a pale wall, or two from the same hand hung close enough to read as a single gesture. How to style Scandinavian wall art in a living room covers placement, and Scandinavian wall decor ideas has the wider options. When you'd rather look than read, the abstract prints are all in one place, and the full wall art collection sets them next to everything else.