Josef Schibli

During the 1950s, while employed at Meijels Bookstore in Halmstad, Schibli began attending evening drawing and printmaking classes under the Halmstad artist Carl Johansson, building a technical foundation over a full decade. In 1960 he deepened his practice at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London, then in 1964 traveled to Paris to work under the master printmaker Johnny Friedlaender, one of the leading figures in post-war European graphic art and a pioneer of colour aquatint. These three training phases - the provincial Swedish studio, London, Paris - reflect both the ambition and the methodical nature of his development.

His preferred techniques were etching, drypoint, aquatint, and colour lithography. The subjects he returned to throughout his career are almost entirely architectural: the worn stonework of doorways and street portals, the layered facades of old European quarters, narrow canals glimpsed through archways, and the specific quality of light falling across plastered walls. Works such as "Portal i Venedig" and "Fasad med fönster" suggest a particular affinity with Venice, and with the way dense, lived-in urban environments accumulate history in their surfaces. His figural and landscape work is comparatively rare.

Schibli has been associated with the neorealist tendencies in European graphic art that emerged during the 1960s - a movement that reacted against pure abstraction by returning to observed reality while retaining the formal economy of modernism. This positioned him within a broader Continental conversation: from the mid-1960s to the late 1980s, he was a regular presence at Art Basel and held solo exhibitions in Germany, Switzerland, France, and Belgium. He also published an illustrated poetry collection, "Gedichte eines Träumers," in 1957 under his own imprint, an early indication that his inner life found more than one outlet.

In 1974 he returned to Helsingborg from Norrköping, and the city remained his home until his death on 1 June 2019 at the age of 93. He credited Helsingborg's proximity to the Continent - accessible by a short ferry crossing - as a practical reason for the attachment. His work is held in public collections in Malmö, Halmstad, Paris, Berlin, and Switzerland, and at Moderna museet.

On the Nordic auction market, Schibli's prints circulate steadily at modest price levels, typically between 250 and 400 SEK per piece. His 20 lots recorded on Auctionist have appeared primarily at regional Swedish houses including Helsingborgs Auktionskammare, Halmstads Auktionskammare, and Karlstad Hammarö Auktionsverk. The works offered are consistent across his career output: signed and numbered colour lithographs and etchings, with architectural motifs predominating. The low price points reflect the broad print editions he favoured rather than any diminishment of the work itself.