DesignerSwedish
Gunnar Ander
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A brass candlestick by Gunnar Ander catches the light in a particular way. The coloured glass spheres, cherry red, cobalt blue, amber, sit like jewels against the warm glow of polished metal, turning a functional object into something approaching sculpture. These pieces, produced for Ystad Metall throughout the 1950s and 1960s, have become some of the most recognisable objects of Swedish mid-century design, instantly identifiable on the secondary market and endlessly collected.
Gunnar Ander (1908-1976) was born in Lidköping, Sweden, and showed artistic talent early, illustrating for a local newspaper as a teenager. He studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, training as both a designer and architect. His dual competence would prove essential to a career that moved fluidly between materials and scales.
Ander's first major professional engagement came when Erik Hovhammar hired him to develop the design profile at Lindshammars Glasbruk, one of Sweden's smaller but artistically ambitious glass factories. There, Ander developed both functional glassware and art glass, creating an impressive 56 new glass colours for the factory's palette. His understanding of glass as a material, its translucency, its relationship to light, would carry over into his later metalwork.
It was at Ystad Metall, however, that Ander found his lasting creative home. Arriving in the late 1940s, he became the company's principal designer during what would prove to be its most successful period. Working in wrought iron, brass, and nickel silver, Ander designed an extensive range of candlesticks, candelabra, fireplace accessories, and decorative objects. His signature pieces, multi-armed candelabra featuring coloured glass elements from Lindshammars set into slender brass frameworks, perfectly captured the era's appetite for elegant, sculptural objects that could enliven a Scandinavian interior during the long dark winters.
Ander's design language was rooted in Scandinavian functionalism but touched with a decorative warmth that set him apart from more austere contemporaries. His candlesticks balanced geometric rigour with organic curves, and his consistent use of coloured glass against metal created a visual vocabulary that was unmistakably his own. The pieces feel handcrafted even when produced in quantity, a quality that has only increased their appeal to collectors.
His work is held in the collection of the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm. On the Nordic auction market, Ander's candlesticks and candelabra for Ystad Metall appear with remarkable regularity across houses including Helsingborgs Auktionskammare, Karlstad Hammarö Auktionsverk, and Kalmar Auktionsverk. Prices typically range from a few hundred to several thousand kronor, with rare multi-armed candelabra and unusual glass colour combinations commanding the highest bids. His smoking tables and larger decorative pieces have reached upwards of 3,000 SEK at auction.