ArtistSwedish
Bengt Andersson
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Bengt Andersson was born on 31 August 1931 in the Majorna district of Gothenburg and died on 24 October 2008, following a heart attack after a performance at the jazz club Nefertiti in Gothenburg. He signed his visual art under the name Bengt Andersson Råssbyn, after the small community in Bohuslän where he and his wife Anne-Marie made their home.
His training bridged craft and fine art. He studied at Svenska Slöjdföreningen in Gothenburg - the design school later known as Konstindustriella skolan - and at Gerlesborgsskolan, and spent time studying in Spain. In 1962 he took work as a decorator at Kungshuset in Uddevalla and moved his family there, establishing a base in the west coast region that would shape his output for the rest of his life.
Andersson debuted as a visual artist in 1967 at the Nyttokonst gallery in Uddevalla. From 1971 onward he and Anne-Marie opened their home in Råssbyn each summer for exhibitions, a low-key but sustained presence that built a steady following among collectors in the region. His paintings moved between abstract compositions rooted in musical feeling and more representational landscape work - coastal views, dramatic skies, water in different lights. The palette tends toward the saturated: strong blues and greens for seascape, warm ochres for meadow and shore.
The inseparability of music and painting was a defining feature of his practice. In the 1980s he played in a quintet with Ulf Bandgren, Raymond Karlsson, and Per-Ola Gadd, releasing the LP "Vackert Väder" in 1983. In the late 1990s he co-founded the quartet Jazz and Art with Sten Löfman, Clas Engwall, and Gunnar Petersson, performing with live painting in the studio at Råssbyn. During performances Andersson would alternate between playing harmonica and painting, the jazz improvisations feeding directly into the abstract color compositions he produced on stage.
His graphic work - serigraphs and color lithographs, often in editions of around 200-300 - represents the most accessible portion of his output and the side most often encountered at auction today. Subject matter ranges from the figurative (women, still life, archival fashion references) to the landscape and seascape of western Sweden.
His work is represented in regional museum collections in Kristianstad, Uddevalla, Umeå, and Örebro, and in art halls across Stockholm, Gothenburg, Uppsala, and other Swedish cities. Grafikbanken Skane has maintained a stock of his prints.
On Auctionist, Andersson's 44 recorded lots are concentrated overwhelmingly at Garpenhus (38 lots), a smaller regional house, with a further six lots on Auctionet. Prices have remained modest - the top recorded results for the "Kvinnobilder" serigraph series and "Röda högklackade skor" fall in the SEK 400-500 range. This reflects both the accessibility of his editions and the regional rather than national profile of his market. For collectors looking for affordable Swedish post-war graphic art with a distinctive dual-practice character, Andersson's prints offer straightforward entry.