Swedish native Gunnar Norrman (1912-2005), received formal training as a botanist and concert-grade pianist before before deciding to devote himself primarily to art. An autodidact, he focused his art for over 50 years exclusively on drawings and prints in black and white. His subjects - trees, flowers, land- and sea-scapes, more rarely still-lifes - are filled with a poetic silence conveying the oriental tradition of reverence and humility before nature, a strong theme in Norrman's life. While rendering the most fragile detail, he still was able to produce "sumptuous concentrations of black" (John Russell, The New York Times, May 1988), or to create the effect of a cool, silvery mist. As an accomplished musician, he combined in his work the same delicacy and strength required in an interpretation of Brahms, Chopin or Schumann, among the composers he admired most.
Since his earliest individual show at the Malmö Museum in 1942, Norrman has had numerous exhibitions in Europe - with Galerie Brusberg in Berlin, Fischer Fine Art in London, and Galerie Claude Bernard in Paris, inter al. - as well as in Japan. In the United States, Fitch-Febvrel regularly organizes individual exhibitions since his first in 1980, and the Pucker Gallery in Boston is organizing his tenth exhibition since 1994 in 2014, each with accompanying catalogue. The catalogue raisonné of Gunnar Norrmans engravings, edited by Fitch-Febvrel, was published in 2005.
Norrman's work can be found in the collections of a score of museums, including those of the Metropolitan Museum, the New York Public Library and the British Museum, London.