ArtistSwedish
Hans Hamngren
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Hans Uno Hamngren was born on 2 May 1934 in Västerås and spent most of his working life in Stockholm, where he died on 22 November 2017. He came of age artistically in the decade after the war, entering Konstfack in 1952 at eighteen. His four years there gave him a thorough grounding in applied graphics and printmaking before he returned to formal study in the 1960s, this time at Konsthögskolan - the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm - where he trained from 1962 to 1967. The gap between those two periods of education, a decade working outside academia, shaped the directness and social urgency that marked his mature work.
In the 1960s Hamngren developed a style of drawing and printmaking that was dense, expressively lined, and politically alert. His graphics from this period are characterised by a sense of unease: figures and forms under pressure, compositions that resist easy resolution. He sometimes worked collage elements into prints, fragmenting the pictorial surface in ways that anticipated later Swedish conceptual tendencies. The mood was consistently anxious, which in the context of 1960s Sweden carried its own social charge - a generation questioning the welfare state's smooth surfaces.
From the early 1970s Hamngren shifted his primary focus to anamorphosis - images that appear distorted when seen straight on but resolve into legible form when viewed in a cylindrical or pyramidal mirror placed at the centre of the composition. This was not a common pursuit among Swedish artists of the time. The technique had a long art-historical lineage running back through baroque illusionism to the Renaissance, but Hamngren approached it as a contemporary conceptual and perceptual problem. The viewer has to physically engage with the work - positioning a mirror, moving around it - to complete the image. His anamorphic prints from this period are among the more technically unusual works in twentieth-century Swedish printmaking.
His work entered significant public collections including Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, the Finnish National Gallery, and the print collection of the New York Public Library. He exhibited widely both in Sweden and internationally. His son Olle Hamngren, born 1960, also became an artist.
At auction, Hamngren's work appears primarily through Swedish houses - Karlstad Hammarö Auktionsverk, Stockholms Auktionsverk, Stadsauktion Sundsvall, and Limhamns Auktionsbyrå among others. The 21 items in the Auctionist database are categorised mainly as Art and Prints & Engravings. The top recorded sale was a signed and numbered print titled "Claude Monet" at approximately 1,567 EUR. Colour lithographs and etchings appear in the 350-1,200 SEK range, placing him solidly in the secondary market for mid-tier twentieth-century Swedish graphics.