ArtistSwedish
John Wipp
1 active items
John Olov Wipp was born on October 31, 1927 in Brännkyrka, then a southern suburb of Stockholm. His father Anders was a bricklayer, and his mother Kristina Samuelsson died when John and his twin brother Erik were only seven years old. The circumstances of his upbringing - working-class Stockholm, early loss, and a twin's particular relation to identity and doubling - may have seeded the ambiguous, fragmented imagery that would later define his art.
Wipp's formal training began in 1946 with evening classes at Konstfack, the Stockholm college of arts and crafts. After a study trip to England and a showing at the Vårsalongen at Liljevalchs Konsthall in 1948, he completed military service before returning to Konstfack from 1950 to 1952, studying under painter and designer Tor Hörlin. A scholarship in 1953 took him to the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Florence, and in spring 1959 he spent a period at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. This sequence of European study gave him both technical grounding and exposure to a wide range of painting traditions, from Italian Renaissance fresco to British figurative art.
By the early 1960s Wipp had settled in Lund, which became his permanent base. His work in this period was characterised by symbolic, fragmented compositions in which shards of recognizable reality - figures, objects, architectural elements - were embedded in layered, often unsettling spaces. He described his images as attempts to interpret humanity's relationship to a threatening world: ambiguous not from obscurantism but from a conviction that threat itself is rarely direct or legible. He worked across painting, drawing, printmaking (including linocut and etching), and eventually poetry.
From 1964 to 1968 Wipp lectured at the Department of Architecture at Lund Technical University. In 1968 he was appointed acting Professor of Painting at Konsthögskolan, the Royal University College of Fine Arts in Stockholm, before returning to Lund Technical University from 1971 until his retirement from teaching in 1977. Between 1952 and 1998 he executed around fifty public art commissions across Sweden, the majority in Skåne: wall mosaics and enamel paintings for the Svaneskolans in Lund, mosaics for high-rise housing in Limhamn (1961), the hospital in Trelleborg (1963), and a major commission for the Rosengard area of Malmo in 1966. His public work gives physical form to a sustained engagement with communal, civic space that his studio practice made private.
In parallel with his visual work, Wipp wrote and published poetry. His debut collection, Sovande sjo, appeared in 1990, followed by Blick (1996, Ellerstroms forlag) and Himlen ar vit (2002, Ellerstroms forlag). The poetry and the visual art share a symbolic, compressed language. Solo exhibitions included Malmo Museum (1958), Skissernas Museum at Lund University (1960 and 1972), Goteborgs Konsthall and Ystads Konstmuseum (1983), and a retrospective at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm in 1998. A second major retrospective, Vagen till vaggen, was held at Skissernas Museum in 1996. Three months after his death on June 1, 2005 in Lund, he was honoured with an exhibition at Tomarps Kungsgard Castle near Astorp. His work entered the collections of Moderna Museet in Stockholm, which holds 22 works including paintings, drawings, and graphic art.
On the auction market Wipp's work appears primarily at regional Swedish houses: Crafoord Auktioner in Lund leads with five of the 14 recorded lots, followed by Markus Auktioner and Bjornssons Auktionskammare. The category split reflects his practice - paintings and works on paper appear alongside prints and drawings. Prices have been modest, with a composition in oil on panel reaching 601 SEK as the current highest recorded result on Auctionist, suggesting that his critical standing among museums and public art collections has not yet translated into strong secondary market activity.