Olive Passage

A striking mid-century modernist abstract composition, painted in oil onto canvas by the established Swedish painter Hans Osswald (1919-1983), whose works have been exhibited at the National Museum in Stockholm, Malmö Museum as well as The Brooklyn Museum.

This composition unfolds through sweeping gestures and layered passages of colour, balancing movement with spacious calm. Broad arcs of cream and white drift across fields of olive, sage, and muted khaki, while flashes of cobalt blue, burnt ochre, and deep black cut through the composition with energetic contrast. The painting carries a strong sense of rhythm and spontaneity, evoking shifting landscapes, weather patterns, or fragments of memory rather than a fixed subject.

Executed in a gestural modernist style, the work embraces the expressive freedom associated with post-war abstraction. Thick impasto passages and palette-knife textures create a richly tactile surface, with paint applied in sweeping crescents, scraped layers, and heavily worked sections that reveal the artist’s process. The interplay between dense texture and open negative space gives the composition both tension and balance, allowing the eye to travel fluidly across the canvas.

The colour palette is particularly refined – earthy olive and moss tones anchor the work, softened by warm ivory and cream, while vivid interruptions of blues and yellow introduce vitality and movement. The brushwork feels instinctive yet controlled, combining confident gestural sweeps with textured, almost sculptural applications of paint.

This oil on canvas is presented in an elegant champagne-toned timber frame. The painting is in excellent vintage condition, and the frame has some scuffs.

Size: 36 x 93 cm (including frame)