ArtistSwedish
Hans Wigert
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Hans Anders Krister Wigert was born on 8 October 1932 in Karlskrona and died on 9 July 2015 in Stavsnäs. He grew up on Sweden's southern coast before moving to Stockholm, where he studied under Staffan Hallström at Gerlesborgsskolan in 1958-1959 and then continued at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts from 1960 to 1965, studying drawing under the sculptor Bror Marklund and painting under Evert Lundquist - one of Sweden's most influential expressionist painters of the twentieth century.
Lundquist's influence is visible throughout Wigert's mature work: a heavy, coarse line, earth tones pushed toward ochre and umber, and figures that seem to grow out of their surroundings rather than stand apart from them. Yet Wigert developed an idiom distinctly his own, one shaped less by the studio than by the landscape of northern Sweden. From the early 1960s onward, after receiving the Grundsunda grant, he spent large parts of each year at Grundsunda in Ångermanland. That place - its forests, shorelines, birds, and light - became the fixed point around which his art turned for more than three decades.
Wigert worked across painting, drawing, printmaking, and sculpture, but it is his graphic work and oil paintings that carry the most concentrated force. His etchings and drypoints show birds, fish, and figures rendered with angular, almost brutal economy - lines that compress a great deal of emotional weight into very few marks. He was not interested in topographical accuracy; the aim, as he put it, was to capture what a place made him feel, not what it looked like. That translated into compositions where the boundary between the human figure and the surrounding landscape is deliberately blurred, both pressing into each other.
His work is represented in the permanent collections of Nationalmuseum, Moderna Museet, Norrköping Art Museum, and Kalmar Art Museum, among others. He exhibited at Liljevalchs in Stockholm and held solo exhibitions on Öland, and his reputation was grounded primarily in Sweden, where he was regarded as one of the leading nature painters of his generation.
In 2004 Wigert received the Prince Eugen Medal, Sweden's highest royal distinction for visual artists. In 2015 - the year of his death - the Royal Academy of Fine Arts awarded him the Egron Lundgren Medal in gold for outstanding achievement in watercolor painting.
At auction, Wigert's work appears most consistently at Bukowskis in Stockholm, which has handled around half of all his recorded auction lots and where his prints and paintings have reached their highest prices. Results on Auctionist show 44 items sold across houses including Bukowskis Stockholm (22 lots), Stockholms Auktionsverk Sickla, and Crafoord in Lund. Prints and engravings make up the largest share of the market, though oils also appear regularly. Top recorded results include "Min vän Odyssefs" at SEK 21,000 and the oil "November" at SEK 5,500, placing him in the mid-range of the Swedish secondary market for post-war graphic artists.