ArtistSwedish
Barbro Bäckström
1 active items
Barbro Agneta Bäckström was born on 6 December 1939 in Stockholm and grew up on the island of Vindö in the Stockholm archipelago. She studied at the University College of Arts, Crafts and Design (Konstfack) in Stockholm between 1960 and 1964. After completing her studies she moved to Lund, the city that would become the center of her working life, and held her first solo exhibition at the Galleri Atheneum there in 1965.
Bäckström's central subject was the human body - specifically its fragments. She returned again and again to hips, backs, stomachs, hands, and torsos, isolating these forms from the whole figure and examining what they carry on their own. The approach was not clinical but empathetic: these are bodies as they are experienced from the inside, not as they are seen from the outside.
Her most distinctive medium was iron mesh (järnduk), which she began working with in the 1960s. Sheets of wire mesh allowed her to shape the human form while keeping it permeable - light and shadow pass through and around the material, giving the sculpture a presence that shifts depending on where the viewer stands. The mesh hangs or is tensioned rather than being fixed as solid mass, which means it occupies space in a way conventional bronze or stone cannot. Alongside the iron mesh works, she produced sculptures in aluminium, lacquered polyester plastic, and bronze, as well as drawings in graphite.
Her public commissions, many of them placed in Malmö and Lund, brought these body-fragment works into schools, hospitals, and outdoor spaces. She also exhibited at the Malmö Art Museum. The combination of public presence and smaller gallery-scale works gave her output a range - from monumental commissions to the intimate miniature pieces (backs, wings, hands) that appear regularly at auction.
Bäckström died in Lund on 8 February 1990, from cancer, at the age of 50. She is buried at Norra Cemetery in Lund. Her husband Holger Bäckström (1939-1997) was also an artist, and the two occasionally exhibited together.
At auction, Bäckström's work sells primarily through southern Swedish houses, with Crafoord Auktioner in Lund accounting for 24 of the 42 recorded lots - a reflection of her strong regional identity. One item is currently active. The top auction result in the database is an iron mesh sculpture titled "Höft" (Hip) which sold for 112,000 SEK. Aluminium sculptures have reached 25,000 SEK, and graphite drawings around 12,000 SEK. Her work appears consistently at regional auction with a stable secondary market.