ArtistSwedish
Kjell Sundberg
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Born in 1942 in Långbäcken, Västerbotten, Kjell Sundberg grew up in the forests of northern Sweden before settling in the small Småland village of Angelstad, near Ljungby. He never attended an art school, a fact he has described as liberating: "I have never attended art school. Therefore, I paint as I wish." That freedom is visible in canvases that resist easy classification - somewhere between surrealism and naivism, always anchored in storytelling.
Sundberg works in oil and acrylic on board and canvas, and produces lithographs and carved wood sculptures. His paintings tend toward dense, layered compositions populated by figures drawn from Swedish and Nordic oral tradition - folk tales, ballads, sagas, and legends. August Strindberg's prose has been another recurring source, as suggested by the Hemsöborna-derived titles that appear in his auction catalogue. The imagery is vivid and sometimes unsettling, with the compressed spatial logic of folk illustration rather than academic perspective.
He debuted at Galleri Miramar in Ljungby in 1979 and has since completed over sixty solo exhibitions, appearing at Galleri A.E. Boj in Stockholm, Galleri Ängeln in Lund, Galleri Galax in Göteborg, Smålands Museum in Växjö, and Northern Light Gallery in Palo Alto, California. His gallery footprint spans the Swedish south and midwest, with occasional forays into international venues.
Public commissions have shaped much of his career. Approximately forty decoration assignments are attributed to him, including oil paintings and sculptures for Ljungby's municipal building and town library, Jönköping's regional theater, Smålands Museum, and Angelstad Church. The most extensive single project is the Sagomuseet (Tale Museum) in Ljungby, where he designed the artistic environment in collaboration with Mia Einarsdotter, creating paintings and carved figures drawn from Swedish and Nordic fairy tales. He also created the illustration series for the book "Den förtrollade pisspottan" (The Enchanted Chamber Pot), published by Rabén and Sjögren in 2001.
At Swedish auction houses, 21 works by Sundberg have appeared, concentrated at Växjö Auktionskammare and Gomér and Andersson in Nyköping and Jönköping. Prices have ranged from 850 EUR to under 10,000 SEK for most lots, placing him solidly in the regional collectors' market. The category profile shows that paintings dominate, with a smaller share of prints and engravings. The work "Ur Hemsöborna: Slåtterfest med slagsmål" sold for 7,666 SEK, and a panel painting with the title "(A tergo) Du har tappat ditt ord och din papper" reached 9,055 SEK - his top recorded result in the database.