ArtistSwedish
Jonny Forsström
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Jonny Forsström was born on 24 March 1944 in Möckleby on the island of Öland, but his childhood was spent far to the north, in the iron-ore mining town of Malmberget in Lapland. The contrast between those two Swedens - one agricultural and coastal, one industrial and arctic - seems to have lodged itself somewhere in his visual imagination. He eventually settled in Trollhättan, the industrial city on the Göta river, and it was there that his working life as an artist took shape.
Forsström was entirely self-taught. Before painting became his occupation he worked as a sailor, a shipyard worker, and in hotels in Gothenburg and Stockholm - a peripatetic life that gave him a close-up view of ordinary people under physical and social pressure. He started to draw and paint seriously in his twenties, and from the beginning his method was unusual: he drew in long, uninterrupted flows, almost always at night, beginning with pencil and building outwards into colour.
The imagery he arrived at defies easy categorisation. He described it himself as 'brutally primitive' - a fantasy figuration that combined family members, friends, angels, exotic animals, strange mythological creatures, figures caught mid-transformation, and animated trees, all placed in theatrical, stage-like settings. The palette was consistently intense, full of saturated reds, blues and ochres that push the figures forward against compressed pictorial space. The mood can be simultaneously folkloric and unsettling.
His international breakthrough came in the early 1970s when he exhibited at Galleri Arnesen in Copenhagen. His work attracted collectors in the United States during certain periods, and he worked across oil painting, watercolour, and printmaking, producing colour lithographs in numbered editions alongside his canvases. In 1990 he was the inaugural exhibitor at Trollhättans konsthall, showing 'Parafras Piero della Francesca' - a body of work that set his intuitive, raw figuration in dialogue with the silence and geometry of the 15th-century Italian master. In 2004 Trollhättan awarded him its annual cultural prize, acknowledging his long presence in the city's artistic life. He died on 9 April 2017, aged 73.
At auction, Forsström's paintings and graphics appear primarily at Swedish regional houses, including Auktionsmagasinet Vänersborg, Göteborgs Auktionsverk, and Stockholms Auktionsverk. His oils on canvas have reached up to 4,000 SEK, while colour lithographs typically sell in the range of 1,400 to 1,800 SEK. The market remains modest and regionally concentrated, reflecting a career that was respected locally but never fully absorbed into the national gallery system.