ArtistSwedish
Lars Hillersberg
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Lars Hillersberg was born in 1937 in Flen, a small town in Sodermanland, Sweden. He studied at the Stockholm College of Art (Stockholms Konsthögskola) from 1961 to 1966, training that placed him squarely within the generation of Swedish artists who came of age during the social upheavals of the 1960s. That political context would define his entire working life.
In January 1968, Hillersberg co-founded the satirical underground magazine PUSS together with Carl Johan De Geer, Lena Svedberg, Karin Frostenson, Ulf Rahmberg, and Leif Katz, among others. PUSS was a left-leaning publication that ran until 1974 and drew on European satirical traditions including the French Masacre and the German Simplicissimus. The magazine trained its sharp eye on Swedish politicians, corporate power, and the country's self-image as a neutral, progressive state, while also condemning US military action in Vietnam. The magazine became one of the central documents of the Swedish radical cultural scene of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Hillersberg's best-known single work is "For Sverige ur Tiden" (For Sweden, Out of Time), a print motif from 1973-1974 that exists in several versions and is held in the collection of Moderna Museet in Stockholm. The image became an emblem of its era. Beyond prints and cartoons, he worked across a range of media including painting, ink drawing, lithography, collage, and large-scale papier-mache sculpture. This breadth placed him outside any single category: he was equally at home in the gallery, the political broadside, and the comic strip.
Over more than three decades he continued producing political cartoons for Swedish publications. In his later years he drew Israel-critical caricatures that sparked public debate about the boundaries of satire, charges he strongly rejected. He received the Adamson Award in 1988 for "50-talet" (The Fifties), the foremost Swedish award for comic art. His works are held in the collections of Moderna Museet and Nationalmuseum. He spent his final years in Gnesta, outside Stockholm, and died in 2004.
On the Auctionist platform, Hillersberg's 14 tracked works span prints, drawings, sculptures, and journals from the PUSS period. His most frequently sold work at auction is "For Sverige ur Tiden", which has achieved prices between 2,580 and 4,400 SEK at Swedish regional houses, with a Bukowskis result reaching 10,000 SEK. Works have appeared at Auktionshuset Thorner and Ek, Halmstads Auktionskammare, Bukowskis Stockholm, and others. A signed ink drawing from 1988 sold for 701 SEK, while a lot of posters achieved 300 SEK, reflecting the wide range in how his output is received depending on medium and provenance.