ArtistSwedish
Caroline Af Ugglas
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Caroline Thérèse af Ugglas Liljedahl was born on 7 April 1972 in Västerled, Bromma, Stockholm. She belongs to the Swedish noble family af Ugglas, a lineage that traces back centuries in Swedish aristocratic history. Growing up in Stockholm, she began painting portraits at the age of ten, and by her early twenties she had committed seriously enough to the practice to receive a stipend for her work — one of the clearest early signals that her art was more than an adjunct to her public profile.
She has built a parallel career as a musician alongside her visual art. She released her debut album Ida Blue in 1997 and participated in Melodifestivalen in 2007, 2009, and 2013. She also created the format for Körslaget, a televised choir competition that was adapted internationally, including as Clash of the Choirs by NBC in the United States and by the Seven Network in Australia. The dual career is not a distraction but a structural feature: she has spoken openly about how music and painting feed the same impulse toward emotional directness.
Her visual art works in oil on canvas, acrylic, lithography, and giclée print. She has developed what she calls "Antidepressism" — a self-defined style characterised by strong, saturated colour, bold gestural marks, and an unapologetic figurative grammar. The clown nose is her most recognisable recurring motif: worn by figures in portraits and self-portraits, it carries layered readings — comedy as survival, the public face and the private one, the vulnerability beneath performance. The style draws loose associations to Scandinavian modernism and, in its flattened pattern-work, to certain strands of Renaissance iconography, without committing to either.
She exhibited at Liljevalchs Spring Salon in 2012, one of Sweden's most competitive open submission exhibitions, and her work has been shown at galleries across Sweden including Galleri Mats Bergman. She is represented by Hedenius Editions for prints. Her acrylic work "Herr går man puzzle" was exhibited internationally, with documented provenance from a European gallery context.
In the Auctionist database, Caroline af Ugglas appears in 27 items across a range of Swedish houses, with the deepest inventory at Kalmar Auktionsverk (9 items) and Stockholms Auktionsverk Magasin 5 (6 items). The top recorded result is 52,000 SEK for a self-portrait oil painting, "Flicka med sticka", confirming that original paintings reach substantially higher valuations than her prints and giclées, which typically trade in the 2,000–4,300 SEK range. The spread between original and editioned work is significant and reflects a collector base that distinguishes clearly between the two.