ArtistSwedish
Kjell Lönnå
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Kjell Olov Lönnå was born on 13 July 1936 in Smedjebacken, a small ironworks town in the Norrbärke parish of Dalarna. His upbringing in the cultural landscape of central Sweden gave him two parallel dispositions that would run through his entire adult life: a feel for visual form and an ear for choral music. Both would eventually produce careers, though the musical one would eventually overshadow the pictorial in the broader public eye.
After finishing secondary school, Lönnå enrolled at Anders Beckmans Konstskola in Stockholm, studying graphic arts from 1955 to 1957. Beckmans was at the time Sweden's primary institution for commercial and applied graphic design, and the training gave Lönnå a thorough grounding in printmaking, composition, and the mechanics of reproduction. On completing the course he moved to Sundsvall on the Norrland coast and took up a post as a drawing teacher, a position he would hold until 1980. Teaching provided stability; the studio practice continued in parallel.
Over the following decades Lönnå worked across an unusually wide range of printmaking and drawing techniques: lithography, etching, engraving, woodcut, copper engraving, gouache, watercolour, and mixed media. His colour lithographs - often featuring musical motifs, animals, and landscapes imbued with a quiet lyrical quality - circulated through galleries across Sweden from the 1990s onward. He exhibited at Galleri Versalen in Sundsvall on multiple occasions from 1995 to 2008, as well as at Taxinge Castle (1994-2003), Galleri Max in Stockholm (1997), Örebro Castle (1999), Galleri Dialog in Stockholm (2002), and Eksjö Museum (2004), among other venues.
The titles that survive through auction records - "Det är något bortom bergen" (There is something beyond the mountains), "Musikalisk katt" (Musical cat), "Notfragment" (Note fragment) - suggest a sensibility where music and image were never far apart. This was not a coincidence. From 1965 onward Lönnå led the Sundsvall Chamber Choir, an ensemble he had helped found, and later also conducted the KFUM Choir and the women's choir Confetti. His work as a choir conductor and composer brought him national visibility: he was one of the leading figures of the Swedish national choir movement, served as a conductor for the National Swedish Choir Association (Svenska körförbundet), and hosted several nationally broadcast television programmes dedicated to choral music from the late 1970s until the late 1990s. He was a committed Baptist and wrote hymns, at least one of which entered the current edition of Den Svenska Psalmboken.
Lönnå died on 10 May 2022, at eighty-five, in Sundsvall.
On the Nordic auction market his work is handled predominantly in the region that knew him best. Of the twenty items on Auctionist, seven have sold through Stadsauktion Sundsvall and four through Höörs Auktionshall, with further appearances at Halmstads Auktionskammare and Karlstad Hammarö Auktionsverk. Top results include a watercolour on paper and a colour lithograph each at 500 SEK. The presence of watercolours alongside graphic prints reflects the breadth of his studio output, while prices remain modest, consistent with a regional artist who never positioned himself primarily in the art market.