ArtistSwedish
Kjell Hobjer
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The faces look back at you. Lopsided, earnest, sometimes wry - the figures in Kjell Hobjer's paintings have an insistence about them, as if they have something to say and are waiting patiently for you to listen. Hobjer called his genre 'gubbism', a word that is difficult to translate but carries the Swedish sense of small, ordinary men and the world they inhabit. The label stuck, and so did the work.
Hobjer was born on November 18, 1951, in Överluleå in northern Sweden, though it was in Ronneby, Blekinge, where he spent most of his life and became a central figure in the local cultural landscape. He developed his distinctive approach from his earliest sketches in the late 1960s, gradually refining a way of painting that was simultaneously naivistic and deeply personal - figures built from simplified forms, faces rendered with expressive directness, compositions that feel closer to lived experience than to academic tradition.
His primary medium was oil on board, a practical format that suited his prolific output. Over more than five decades he produced an enormous body of work, much of it created in his studio and distributed widely - sometimes quite literally, as he was known to travel by train and hand paintings directly to people he encountered. This direct, unglamorous approach to art distribution matched the spirit of the work itself.
Hobjer was represented in the collection of Blekinge Museum, the regional museum closest to his home in Ronneby, and maintained a public presence through his sculpture as well as painting. His large bronze statue 'Gubbkvinna' stands in Brunnsparken in Ronneby, a permanent fixture in the town's public space that translates his painterly language into three dimensions.
In 2009 he received Ronneby Municipality's culture prize, cited for 'versatile and vital artistic work, characterized by curiosity and attentiveness with elements of humor and provocation' while maintaining a personal expression that continued to develop throughout his career. A documentary film, 'Hobjer - Vet ni varför jag är som jag är?', was screened at Blekinge Museum and offered a portrait of the artist on his own terms.
Hobjer died on March 22, 2025, after a period of illness, at the age of 73. He was described in Swedish press as 'gubbismens fader' - the father of gubbism - a title that captured both his originality and his place in regional Swedish cultural life. On Auctionist, his work appears primarily through auction houses in southern Sweden, including Ekenbergs and Auktionshuset Kolonn, with pieces typically offered as oil paintings on board and panel. Auction prices have ranged from a few hundred to several thousand SEK, reflecting his status as a locally valued and regionally collected painter.