ArtistSwedish
Ivar Ekelund
1 active items
Gustav Ivar Ekelund was born on 10 October 1908 in Stockholm, though it was the Skane coastline and the farming plains of southern Sweden that would eventually define his visual language. He came to painting comparatively late - formal studies began only in 1946 at Signe Barth's painting school in Stockholm, followed by a year under Isaac Grünewald, the colorist who had himself trained under Matisse and whose influence on Swedish modernism was far-reaching. By 1948 Ekelund had debuted at Galerie Moderne in Stockholm and had simultaneously held a solo exhibition in Östersund.
In 1949 he received the Ester Lindahl fellowship, which supported a period of intensive study abroad. He worked in Denmark, then at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris - the studio school where Giacometti and Leger had taught - before travelling through France and Spain until 1951. These years consolidated a practice built on tension between observation and reduction: farmyards, laundry drying on a line, flat-horizoned fields seen with a structural clarity that owed something to Cézanne and something to Scandinavian folk clarity.
Ekelund settled in Skane, and in 1969 he opened Gallery Cimbria in Simrishamn, a small harbourside town on the southeast tip of Sweden. The gallery became a hub for artists working in the region, and Ekelund was a founding figure in Hanöland, the art circuit that later became ÖSKG (Östra Skånes Konstnärsgrupp). His non-figurative paintings and collages from the 1960s and 1970s show an artist willing to move between modes - woodcuts with flat graphic planes, oils that dissolve landscape into near-abstract passages of colour. In 1955 he received the H. Ax:son Johnson stipend and in 1977 the Royal Academy of Arts Pension Stipend, which supported his practice until his death in Nacka in 2002. His work entered the permanent collections of Moderna Museet, Ystad Art Museum and Norrköping Art Museum.
On the Nordic auction market, Ekelund appears primarily at Skane-based houses, which reflects his long connection to the region. Crafoord Auktioner in Malmo accounts for the largest share of his traded works, followed by Stockholms Auktionsverk Sickla and Skanes Auktionsverk. Prices at auction have been modest, with a landscape titled 'Tvatt pa tork' - laundry hanging to dry against house facades - and 'Gard pa slatten' each selling in the low thousands of Swedish kronor. With 11 items catalogued across Auctionist, all recorded lots are paintings, suggesting that his prints and graphic works circulate less frequently in the Nordic auction system.