ArtistSwedish
Gudmar Olovson
1 active items
Gudmar Olovson was born on 1 March 1936 in Boden, Sweden, and trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, where his teachers included Bror Hjorth and Stig Blomberg. After a formative period in Florence and Rome, he moved to Paris in 1959, settling first at the Cité Universitaire before taking a studio in Montparnasse. The city would become his permanent home for nearly six decades, and it was there that he developed the figurative language that defined his entire career.
In Paris, Olovson came under the influence of sculptor Jean Carton, who became his principal mentor. In 1963 he co-founded Le Groupe des Neuf, a collective of nine sculptors who defended figurative and non-academic sculpture at a moment when the Parisian art world was almost entirely oriented toward abstraction. The group exhibited together across France and helped carve out space for representational work during a period of intense avant-garde pressure against it.
Olovson's preferred medium was lost-wax bronze (cire perdue), and his subjects ranged from female figures in motion to mythological encounters and the natural world. Beyond sculpture, he produced an extensive body of lithographs, etchings, and aquatints - graphic work that often explored the same themes as his three-dimensional pieces. His output over six decades amounts to more than 200 original sculpture works alongside a large print archive.
His career brought significant public recognition. France awarded him the Prix de la Grèce de l'art libre at the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris in 1963, and in 1970 he received the Médaille d'Or from La Société des Artistes Français for his sculpture "Les Deux Arbres." That same work - a two-part bronze standing 2.4 metres tall - was later installed permanently on an island in the Lac Supérieur of the Bois de Boulogne in 2001, a gift from Swedish industry to the city of Paris. In 2011 Olovson was appointed Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French government, one of France's highest cultural distinctions.
As a portrait sculptor he was commissioned by some of the most prominent figures of his era. He produced portrait busts of French presidents Charles de Gaulle, Georges Pompidou, and Jacques Chirac, as well as HRH King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden, Crown Princess Victoria, the actress Ingrid Bergman, and wine baron Philippe de Rothschild. A full retrospective of his work was held at La Monnaie de Paris in 2007. He died on 17 April 2017.
On the Nordic auction market, Olovson's sculptures appear regularly at Bukowskis, Uppsala Auktionskammare, and Metropol, among others. The 22 items recorded in the Auctionist database span bronzes, cold-bronze casts, and prints. Top recorded hammer prices include 10,000 SEK for a work titled "Lissan" and 8,522 SEK for a cast of "Les Deux Arbres." His prints and etchings typically sell in the range of 91-300 SEK, while his sculptural work commands the strongest interest from collectors.