ArtistPolish-Swedish
Dagmar Glemme
0 active items
Born in Turek, Poland, in 1942, Dagmar Glemme grew up in post-war Germany, an experience that left a permanent mark on her imagery - myths, symbolic animals, and the fragile relationship between human beings and the natural world recur throughout her work. She pursued an unusually broad academic path at the University of Hamburg, earning three degrees covering gymnastics and dance pedagogy, architecture, and art (painting and sculpture). The architectural training in particular shaped her sense of scale and spatial composition, visible in her later large-format public commissions.
In 1973 she moved to Sweden, and within two years had committed fully to life as a professional artist. She settled eventually in Halland, on the Swedish west coast, a region she would help define culturally. She was instrumental in founding the Nordic Art Fair in Sundsvall and established two galleries in Halmstad - Toftasjö Konstgård and Särdals Mill. In 2012 she opened Dagmar Glemme Art Center in Hasslarp outside Helsingborg, relocating it in 2017 to Villshärad, Halmstad, where the center ran until her death in February 2024.
Glemme worked across a striking range of materials: lithographs, acrylic and mixed-media paintings, ceramics, bronze, stone carving, and glass. Her glass work took her to Berengo Fine Arts on the island of Murano in Venice, to Kosta Boda, Bergdala Glassworks, and Studio Micke Johansson in Örsjö. The consistent thread across media is a mythological and symbolic sensibility - recurring motifs include birds, horses, fish, composite creatures, and human faces that emerge from abstract color fields.
Her public art spans three continents. A painting for peace was acquired for display at the United Nations in New York. The sculpture "Tree of Knowledge" stands outside Art Clinic in Jönköping. Four large-scale murals were commissioned for the Church of Resurrection in Fort de France, Martinique. Her most ambitious outdoor project, "Weg der Steine" (Avenue of the Stones), consists of 21 monumental stone sculptures, each two to three metres tall, permanently installed in the pedestrian streets of Uelzen, Germany - a project that earned her the honorary prize of that city. In 2020, she received the Halmstad Municipality Culture Prize, awarded with unanimous support from the cultural committee.
On the auction market, Glemme's work appears primarily through Swedish regional houses, with Stadsauktion Sundsvall accounting for the largest share of lots - fitting given her long association with the city. Her prints and lithographs are the most frequently offered works, while mixed-media pieces and her glass objects also surface occasionally. Realized prices have been modest, with the top recorded sale at 4,000 SEK for a mixed-media piece titled "Lion King". The breadth of materials and geographies in her practice makes her an unusual figure in the Swedish secondary market, and her work from the Villshärad period has not yet been broadly distributed through auction.