ArtistSwedish
Leif Ericson
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Leif Ericson was born on 1 January 1927 in Mölndal, a small industrial town south of Gothenburg. His father worked at the Papyrus paper mill and had a habit of bringing home surplus paper, which meant the young Ericson always had something to draw on. That early, unglamorous access to materials gave him a practical relationship with image-making long before any formal training.
He began his studies at Slöjdföreningens skola in Gothenburg from 1946 to 1949, working under the graphic artist Nils Wedel. A turning point came in 1948 when he attended a major exhibition of work by Endre Nemes at Gothenburg's Konsthall. The Hungarian-born surrealist, who brought European modernist ideas to Swedish art education, made a deep impression. Ericson went on to study under Nemes directly at Valands konstskola from 1950 to 1955, becoming part of the generation that transformed Valand into one of Scandinavia's most internationally oriented art schools during the postwar decades.
Nemes's influence showed in Ericson's taste for the figurative but fantastical, for images that hold recognizable subjects at a slight tilt from reality. His paintings draw on scenes from circus performances at Lorensberg in Gothenburg, from jazz and popular music, from theater and film. Puppets, marionettes, musicians and performers recur, treated with a lightness that avoids sentimentality. There is an improvisatory quality to much of his work, a sense that the paintings were made in the same spirit as jazz, structured but open to spontaneity.
Ericson debuted at Konsthallen in Gothenburg in 1960 and went on to hold approximately 30 solo exhibitions over his career, showing at Konstnärshuset, Galerie Blanche and Grafiska Sällskapet in Stockholm, among other venues. He participated in group exhibitions including Nya Valand (1957) and the retrospective survey Valand, Göteborg-Europa, Generation 47-55 at Kulturhuset in Stockholm in 1988. His work entered the permanent collections of Nationalmuseum and Moderna Museet in Stockholm. He lived and worked in Stockholm until his death on 24 February 2023, aged 96.
At auction, Ericson's work is traded almost exclusively through Bukowskis in Stockholm, which accounts for 60 of the 70 items in this database, a concentration that reflects both the house's strength in Swedish modern art and the artist's long association with the Stockholm market. His output at auction spans paintings and works on paper, including gouache and lithography. Recorded prices in this dataset are modest, with a gouache from 1954 reaching 1,100 SEK and a color lithograph from 1993 selling for 300 SEK, though MutualArt records his auction prices reaching the equivalent of several thousand USD for stronger works.