ArtistSwedish
Lars Eje Larsson
4 active items
Lars Eje Larsson was born in Gothenburg in 1954 and took up oil painting at the age of twelve, exhibiting collectively a year later. That early start shaped a career defined by sustained formal development rather than a single stylistic moment. His training moved through several institutions: Gerlesborgsskolan (1972), art history at the University of Gothenburg (1974-1975), Kv:s Konstskola (1975-1976), an art teacher program at Umeå University (1977-1980), and a lithography course for professional artists at KKV (1988).
After completing his teacher training he returned to Gothenburg in 1981. His first solo exhibition, in 1982, presented watercolors alongside oil paintings. For the following decade he worked three-quarters time as a teacher while building an exhibition practice, but by 1992 income from art had outpaced his salary and he left teaching entirely to focus on painting. The transition marked a shift in productive scale: solo exhibitions became an annual or more-than-annual fixture, and recurring watercolor courses in Sweden and Spain became a secondary strand of his professional life.
His primary medium is watercolor, though he also works in acrylic and color lithography. The paintings position themselves between figuration and abstraction - garden scenes, still lifes, figures, landscapes - but the underlying concern is atmospheric and optical rather than descriptive. Light is the organizing principle: he treats contrasts between surfaces and forms as the primary carriers of spatial tension, and works with opposing textures within a single surface to shift the mood of an image. The approach is technically unconventional; he has described moving away from orthodox watercolor technique toward a more experimental handling that allows greater tonal complexity.
His exhibition record extends across Scandinavia, with showings also in France, Spain, the Netherlands, Austria, Italy, and China. Institutional connections include the Nordic Watercolor Museum (Nordiska Akvarellmuseet) in Skärhamn, where he has led courses, and professional memberships in Konstnärscentrum Väst (KC-Väst), the Nordic Watercolor Society, and Göteborgs Konstklubb, where he served as chairman from 1993 to 1998 and has held honorary chairmanship since. He has also chaired Galleri Majnabbe in Gothenburg.
In the Auctionist database his 21 items appear predominantly through Metropol, Helsingborgs Auktionskammare, and Göteborgs Auktionsverk. The work offered includes watercolors, color lithographs, and mixed-media pieces. Top achieved prices cluster in the range of 200-800 SEK, with a garden watercolor reaching 800 SEK and a color lithograph "Stilleben med hink" selling for 350 SEK. Auction presence is domestic and modest in scale, consistent with an active gallery-based career rather than a secondary-market-driven one.