ArtistSwedish
Erik Reimhult
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Erik Reimhult grew up in Hjorted Parish in Kalmar County, a rural corner of Småland where forests and wildlife were part of daily life. Born in 1915, he began carving animals and human figures from wood as a child, an early habit that pointed unmistakably toward what would become a lifelong vocation. His formal training came later, at the Västervik Bildhuggarskola between 1942 and 1945, and was supplemented in 1957 by a period spent working alongside Bror Hjorth in Uppsala, one of Sweden's most distinctive figure sculptors of the era.
Reihmult's defining quality as a sculptor was a willingness to let his tools speak. Rather than smoothing and refining surfaces into academic tidiness, he developed a technique built around the saw - using its blade to cut, shape, and texture the wood in ways that preserved the grain's raw character. The resulting surfaces carry a deliberate roughness, a visual energy that suits the animals he depicted: moose in motion, foxes alert in the undergrowth, deer and wild boar rendered with a sense of weight and presence that polished surfaces might have muted.
His subjects were drawn from the same Småland forests that surrounded his home. This was not merely a stylistic choice but a reflection of genuine familiarity - he worked from close observation, and the specificity shows in posture, proportion, and the way each piece holds the eye. The sculptures are rarely monumental in scale, but they carry a physicality that makes them convincing in almost any setting.
Reihmult exhibited widely across Sweden, with solo shows in Karlskrona, Uddevalla, Linköping, Mariestad, Växjö, and Kalmar Art Museum, among others. He also showed at the Museum of Natural History in Stockholm and the Forest Museum in Gävle, venues whose scientific and ecological contexts gave his animal sculptures a particular resonance. He lived and worked outside Västervik until his death in Törnsfall Parish in 1999.
At auction, Reimhult's work appears primarily through regional Swedish houses. On Auctionist, all 19 items in the database have passed through auction, with Auktionshuset Thelin & Johansson accounting for 15 of them - reflecting the strong local connection to Västervik. The works are catalogued almost entirely as sculptures, with moose, elk, and fox subjects recurring across listings. Top recorded prices on the platform reach approximately 1,876 SEK, consistent with the modest secondary market for smaller-format regional wood sculpture. His work surfaces periodically at Auctionet and at specialist houses in Kalmar and Norrköping.