ArtistSwedish
Brita Molin
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Born Brita Hellstrand on 12 June 1919 in Skara, Brita Molin came to printmaking through a long arc of study that took her from Stockholm's private painting schools to a pivotal year in Paris. She first studied at Grünewald's and Sköld's painting schools in 1946-1948, then returned to formal training at the School of Higher Applied Arts in Stockholm from 1954-1956, where she concentrated on mosaic and lithography. Later still, she attended the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm in 1963-1964 before travelling to Paris to work with Stanley William Hayter at the legendary Atelier 17 in 1964-1965. That contact with Hayter's intaglio methods shaped the technical foundation of everything that followed.
Colour was the central force in Molin's visual language. She described her image-making in terms of music, drawing comparisons between the layering of printed colours and the interplay of voices in a composition. This analogy ran through her entire career: works such as "Gospel" (1969) and "Flower Power" (1968), held in the Moderna Museet collection, carry a rhythmic, almost syncopated energy. Yet her subject matter remained rooted firmly in the natural world. She was drawn to forests, birds, and the open savanna - the African title "Antilopland" and the Kenyan subject "Severe Weather over Nakuru" appear among her etchings, as do images of cheetahs, turacos, and the dense tangle of tropical rainforest in works such as "Regnskog".
Molin's standing within Swedish printmaking was institutional as well as artistic. She served as chairperson of the Grafiska Sällskapet (the Swedish Graphic Artists' Society) from 1974 to 1977, helping to shape the organisation's public programme during a period of expanding interest in fine-art printmaking. Her work entered major collections on both sides of the Atlantic. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York holds at least two works: "Vindriset" (1968), an intaglio embossing in red, green, black, and violet gifted by the artist, and "Open Doors" (1972), an inkless embossed intaglio printed on Hahnemühle paper for the Print Club of Cleveland in an edition of 260. The Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, the Kunstmuseum Berlin, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and the National Gallery of Ireland are among the other institutions that hold her prints.
Beyond printmaking, Molin worked in oil, pastel, mosaic, and stucco lustro - a range that reflects the same appetite for material experimentation that led her from painting school to Hayter's atelier. Her oil paintings, such as the harbourside sketches and abstract compositions that surface at auction, show a looser hand than her printed work but the same preoccupation with colour saturation.
Molin died on 26 September 2008 in Stockholm's Maria Magdalena parish. On the Swedish auction market her work circulates mainly through regional houses - Borås Auktionshall, Örebro Stadsauktioner, Gomér & Andersson, and Karlstad Hammarö Auktionsverk account for the bulk of her 19 appearances on record. Price levels are modest, with top results around 1,700 SEK for oils and 300-500 SEK for her colour graphics, suggesting that her international museum presence has not yet translated into strong secondary-market demand domestically. Works from her graphic editions, often numbered in runs of 60 to 210, offer accessible points of entry for collectors interested in mid-century Swedish printmaking.