ArtistSwedish
Inge Pettersson
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Björn Inge Pettersson was born in 1944 in Norrköping, a city in Östergötland with a strong textile and industrial heritage that shaped its visual culture. He grew up in this environment and eventually pursued formal art studies at several painting schools, supplemented by private tuition from established artists. This route outside the major academies gave his practice an independence from institutional fashion that would define his working life.
Pettersson settled near Mälaren's shore in Sigtuna, a small town with deep medieval roots north of Stockholm, and made it his base for decades. Alongside his own painting he worked as a drawing teacher at a secondary school in Valdemarsvik, and led adult study courses in painting and drawing throughout the region. He also worked as an illustrator contributing to Norrköpings Tidningar, and did design work for a book publisher - forms of applied practice that kept him in contact with craft demands beyond the studio. His work is represented in the collections of Söderköpings kommun, Valdemarsviks kommun and Östergötlands läns landsting.
His painting centres on a set of recurring subjects: flower still lifes, meadows thick with poppies, blossoming fruit trees in early spring, coastal views and garden spaces. He works primarily in oil and watercolor, with a palette that favors warm greens, pinks and the saturated blues of sky and water. The approach is rooted in direct observation rather than conceptual programme - Pettersson has consistently preferred to paint what the eye finds pleasurable and what light does to living things.
A significant strand of his garden paintings draws on a visit to Claude Monet's property at Giverny in Normandy. The famous water lily pond and the arching Japanese bridge appear in several of his oil paintings, including 'Monets näckrosdamm' in multiple versions. This is not imitation of Monet's technique but rather a painter using the same subject - water, reflection, floating leaves - as a vehicle for his own response to light and color. Pettersson has exhibited in Söderköping, Norrköping, Sigtuna, Valdemarsvik and Nora, and at Galleri Götlin.
On the auction market Pettersson's oil paintings sell consistently at Swedish regional houses. On Auctionist, 12 items have been recorded, all paintings, with the majority handled by Metropol in Stockholm. Top results include a park motif with a pond at 4,400 SEK and two versions of the Monet water lily pond each realising 3,200 SEK. A garden view from Monet's garden reached 3,000 SEK. Prices cluster in the 2,000-4,500 SEK range for signed oil on canvas, suggesting a steady collector base among buyers who respond to accessible, light-filled Swedish landscape painting.