ArtistSwedish
Jan-Christer Lundqvist
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Jan-Christer Lundqvist was born in Sörbygden, a small community in Jämtland in northern Sweden, and grew up in Falköping in Västergötland before settling in Skövde, the city that would define his working life. There he established his own workshop and shop, raised a family, and over several decades built a body of work that moved fluidly between goldsmithing and painting - two practices he treated as inseparable expressions of the same sensibility.
Nature was the constant source behind his craft. The mountains of Jämtland, where he had fished as a boy and returned throughout his life, informed the quieter, more elemental qualities in his jewelry - the organic contours, the sense of weight and texture that no machine could replicate. The rugged coastline of Bohuslän fed something different: a more dynamic, geologically assertive quality visible in pieces that use porphyry and raw stone surfaces alongside polished precious metals. His love for landscape was not decorative reference but structural logic.
His technical range was considerable. Working in sterling silver and 18K gold, he combined hammered surfaces with precision-set stones - spectrolite, diamonds, pyrite, porphyry from the Loka-Risberg quarry in Värmland - and integrated enamel work with a painter's feel for colour. Pieces are consistently signed and stamped with place (Skövde) and year, giving collectors a clear chronological thread running from the 1980s into the early 2000s. The named works, such as 'Reflex 2' from 1990, suggest an artist thinking in series and concept rather than simply in production.
He participated regularly in Nordic craft competitions, where his work received both awards and honourable mentions. His jewelry was exhibited at major Swedish cultural institutions including the Swedish History Museum in Stockholm, the Röhsska Museum - Sweden's museum of design and craft in Gothenburg - and Malmö Museum, a record of institutional recognition that distinguished him from most working goldsmiths of his generation.
On the auction market, Lundqvist's pieces appear almost exclusively at Bukowskis, Sweden's leading auction house. A dedicated themed collection sale at Bukowskis (auction F717) presented his work to a new generation of buyers, with rings and brooches drawn from across his career. The 11 items indexed on Auctionist originate from Bukowskis Stockholm and Bukowskis Malmö, confirming the house's position as the primary secondary-market channel for his work. Category distribution in the auction database reflects his output: rings dominate, followed by brooches, with occasional miscellaneous pieces.