ArtistSwedish
Evert Lindfors
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Evert Lindfors was born in 1927 in Visby, on the island of Gotland, into a large family of seven siblings. He left the island as a teenager, moved to Stockholm in 1946, and within a year had made his way to Paris alongside the painter Harry Moberg. He enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts, an experience that proved decisive: France would remain the gravitational center of his life and work.
Through the 1950s Lindfors worked primarily as a painter, settling in Lacoste, a small village in the Luberon hills of Provence. The place suited him — remote, sun-hardened, far from the Stockholm art world. It was in Lacoste that he met the Swedish sculptor Torsten Renqvist in Paris in 1968, and that encounter tipped him permanently toward three-dimensional work. Renqvist's encouragement pushed Lindfors to work with clay, and he never looked back.
Terracotta became his medium of choice: hand-built, incised, fired. His figures lean toward the archetypal — faces, heads, standing figures, flying forms — worked with a directness that owes more to pre-Columbian and early European votive traditions than to mid-century modernism. A recurring subject was the human face rendered with a few scored lines in the clay surface, giving each piece both rawness and formal economy. His Noah's Ark series, featuring some fifty fantastical animals in varying clays and firings, showed the range of his imagination and the scale of ambition he could sustain in a modest material.
Lindfors maintained a dual life for decades — his studio in Lacoste and a base on Djurö, an island outside Stockholm, where he lived with his wife, the painter Barbro Blomqvist-Lindfors (1930–2017). This split geography shaped his work: the warmth and aridness of Provence runs through the palette of his terracottas, while his membership in the Swedish Sculptors' Association (Skulptörförbundet) kept him connected to the Nordic context. He was still showing work at his Lacoste atelier in the final years of his life.
In spring 2016, months before his death, Lindfors received the Christensen and Ekman Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts, awarded for a long and meaningful contribution to Swedish artistic life. He died in Lacoste later that year.
On the Nordic auction market, Lindfors appears primarily at Stockholms Auktionsverk, where the majority of his 27 catalogued lots have sold. His work is almost entirely sculptural — 22 of those lots are classified as sculptures, with a small number of paintings. Prices have been modest, with terracotta reliefs and figures typically selling in the 300–3,350 SEK range, reflecting the secondary-market status of an artist whose reputation rests more on his public following in France and within Swedish sculptor circles than on institutional collecting. A standing figure in composite material sold for 1,700 EUR at a 2025 auction, the strongest result on record.