ArtistSwedish
Lars Gynning
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Lars Olof Gynning was born on 29 July 1920 in Karlskrona, Sweden. His artistic education was thorough and cross-border: he passed through Edward Berggren's painting school in Stockholm (1941–42), studied under Otte Sköld (1943) and Isaac Grünewald (1944–46) — two of the most consequential figures in Swedish modernist painting — and then moved to Paris, where he enrolled at the Académie des Beaux-Arts (1946–48) and trained at André Lhote's Académie Libre (1949). Lhote's analytical cubism left a permanent imprint on Gynning's visual language: fragmented planes, crystalline structures, and a restless sense of movement that would define his output for decades.
It was in Paris that Gynning encountered Jean Lurçat, the French painter credited with revitalising the Aubusson tapestry tradition after the Second World War. Lurçat's evangelism for the medium proved decisive. Through this connection Gynning entered into a partnership with Pinton Frères, the storied atelier in Aubusson that had been weaving since 1867, and began designing cartoons that the Pinton weavers translated into large-format gobelin tapestries. He would go on to produce approximately 250 designs for the atelier, making him one of the most prolific foreign artists to work in the postwar Aubusson revival.
Gynning's tapestries range across a breadth of subjects — mythological narratives, coastal landscapes, animal studies, and fully abstract compositions — but they are unified by a chromatic signature: muted, often luminous blues that earned him the nickname Monsieur Bleu in French artistic circles. His works are typically signed L. Gynning or L.O.G., and those executed at Aubusson bear the additional mark PF alongside the atelier's name. Notable woven titles include "Havsfiskar" (Sea Fish, 1950s), "La Vieille Ville" (Gamla Stan), "Madagaskar", "Midsummer Dance", and "Step on the Moon".
Beyond textiles, Gynning worked steadily as a painter in oil, gouache, and mixed media, producing canvases and works on paper that share the cubist-inflected geometry of his tapestry cartoons. In the mid-1960s he turned briefly to the commercial art world, founding Gallery Blue in Stockholm — a venture he handed to a colleague in 1972 in order to return full-time to his studio practice. He died on 29 October 2003 in Stockholm.
On the Nordic auction market Gynning is most consistently represented through his woven tapestries, which account for the majority of interest at Swedish houses. On Auctionist, his 16 catalogued lots span paintings, tapestries, textiles, and works on paper, with appearances at Stockholms Auktionsverk, Bukowskis, Crafoord, and Kalmar Auktionsverk. The highest price recorded in our database is 21,256 SEK for the tapestry "Madagaskar", and a second example of the same composition reached 14,300 SEK, confirming sustained collector demand for his Aubusson pieces. Smaller works in oil and print generally trade in the 1,400–3,400 SEK range.