ArtistSwedish
Åke Larsson
1 active items
Åke Waldemar Larsson was born in 1913 in Sweden and spent most of his creative life connected to Skane, the southernmost province of the country. He trained at the Skanska painting school in Malmo, which shaped both his subject matter and his unaffected approach to composition. From the 1950s onwards he produced an exceptionally large body of work - eventually numbering more than 2,000 pieces - in which the streets, buildings, and working lives of Malmo served as an inexhaustible subject. His drawn and painted records of the city have an understated naivism to them: direct in perspective, tender in observation, and closely tied to a sense of place.
Beyond painting and works on paper, Larsson also worked as a ceramicist producing hand-modelled sculptures in glazed stoneware. His ceramic output, associated with the town of Viken on the Oresund coast north of Helsingborg, consists mainly of figurative subjects - couples, individual figures, animals including an ox, and wall reliefs with monkeys. The pieces are signed 'Åke L' and dated, with works appearing from at least the early 1970s through to the mid-1970s. The stoneware is fired with a dark or earth-toned glaze, and the modelling has a robust, direct quality consistent with his approach to drawing: forms are simplified but not abstracted, and the human presence is always legible.
Larsson used multiple mediums throughout his career - charcoal, pencil, wax, oil, and gouache on paper and canvas alongside ceramic - suggesting a restless practical curiosity rather than allegiance to any single technique. His paintings of Malmo streets and harbour environments in particular record a city undergoing postwar transformation, and they have the quality of a sustained personal archive rather than formal exhibition pieces. He is said to have documented the city 'from the perspective of ordinary people.'
Larsson died in 1995 and bequeathed his entire collection of over 2,000 works to Malmo Museums, more than 1,300 of which have since been digitised and shared through Europeana. This gift represents an unusual degree of institutional commitment to a working life spent largely outside the mainstream of Swedish contemporary art.
At Auctionist his 11 items have appeared across auction houses in Skane and the broader Helsingborg region - including Stockholms Auktionsverk Helsingborg, Helsingborgs Auktionskammare, Skanes Auktionsverk, and Hoganäs Auktionsverk - reflecting his regional roots. All are glazed stoneware sculptures, many described as figure pairs and wall reliefs. The highest result in the database is 1,000 EUR for a Hoganäs-labelled sculpture, with most pieces selling in the range of 300 to 700 SEK, consistent with the collectible ceramics market rather than the fine art auction segment.