ArtistSwedish
Claes Hake
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Claes Hake was born on 7 February 1945 in Mölndal, just south of Gothenburg, and died on 16 October 2025 at the age of 80. He was accepted to the Valand Academy of Art in Gothenburg in 1963 at seventeen, completing his studies there through 1968. His early interest was painting before sculpture gradually took over as his primary form.
His sculptural practice can be mapped across three distinct material phases. In the 1960s he was among the first Swedish sculptors to work seriously with plastic, engaging with a material that was then breaking into the art world as something genuinely new. By the mid-1970s he had left plastic behind for clay, plaster, and bronze, producing cast works with a more direct bodily quality. Then in the 1980s stone became his defining material: diabase and Bohuslän granite, worked into massive arches, gates, and rings that carry an air of geological permanence.
As a sculptor in stone he became best known for works that occupy public space at a civic scale. "Solringen" stands at the Gothenburg University Library; the memorial for the 63 victims of the 1998 Gothenburg discotheque fire (Backabranden) - a slab of polished blue granite ten metres long with each name engraved in gold - was unveiled at Backaplan in 2008 and stands as one of the most significant public memorial commissions in modern Swedish art. His sculptures have been installed in parks, institutions, and public squares in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, and the United States. In 2000 he received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, an American foundation award that recognises working artists internationally.
Alongside the stone sculptures, Hake maintained a parallel practice on paper - working with ink, charcoal, and watercolour on rough handmade paper in an expressive, gestural manner that connects to abstract painting and calligraphy. This body of work on paper was the focus of a major retrospective at Nordiska Akvarellmuseet (the Nordic Watercolour Museum) in Tjörn in 2024-2025, covering work from 1962 to 2024. He was represented by Wetterling Gallery in Stockholm and is held in collections including Moderna Museet.
At auction, Hake's work appears primarily at Gothenburg-area houses, with Stockholms Auktionsverk Göteborg and Göteborgs Auktionsverk accounting for the majority of his 15 lots on Auctionist. The category breakdown - paintings and mixed-media works on paper alongside a smaller number of sculptures - reflects the dual nature of his practice. His top recorded sale on the platform was a pair of compositions in watercolour and oil on paper at 5,506 SEK, with other works in the 790-934 SEK range. Given his standing as a public sculptor with international installations and a major museum retrospective, the auction prices for his works on paper remain relatively modest.