ArtistSwedish
Måna Lagerholm
0 active items
Måna Lagerholm was born in 1946 on the southeast coast of Sweden, in the Blekinge region, and spent her early years there before relocating in 1968 to England with her husband, who was British. She enrolled at Falmouth College of Art in Cornwall, receiving five years of training in drawing and painting, followed by a further year of study in Brighton. This formal education, though conducted entirely in England, sits alongside her categorization by major American collectors as a self-taught or outsider artist -- a classification that reflects the expressive rawness and independence of her pictorial language rather than a lack of institutional engagement.
Lagerholm worked across multiple mediums throughout her career: gouache, watercolor, mixed media on paper, oil on canvas, lithography, and painted ceramic sculpture. Her pictures center on the human figure, depicted with urgency and economy. Crowd scenes, solitary running women, figures gathered at benches or mid-movement in outdoor spaces, animals moving among people -- these subjects appear in her work from the late 1970s onward, rendered in a style that combines modernist spatial compression with something closer to folk vision. The scale and color handling suggest an artist attentive to surface and gesture rather than anatomical description.
She exhibited through Mercury Gallery in London and made prints in Vence in the south of France, where a lithograph signed and dated Vence 1991 was produced in an edition of 200. Her work attracted sustained attention from Anthony Petullo, the Milwaukee-based collector who assembled one of the most important collections of self-taught and outsider art in the United States. Lagerholm's work entered the Petullo Art Collection and, when Petullo donated the bulk of his holdings to the Milwaukee Art Museum in 2010, became part of that institution's permanent collection. The Toomey and Potter auction houses in the United States have included her works in dedicated folk, outsider, and self-taught art sales.
Her ceramic sculptures, several of which appeared at Swedish auctions during the 1990s and 2000s, show the same figurative vocabulary as her works on paper. Painted earthenware figurines, wall-mounted ceramic reliefs, and freestanding sculptural pieces signed with the short form "Måna" carry the same quality of observed gesture compressed into compact form.
Lagerholm died in 2001 at age 55. The relative brevity of her career and the geographic dispersal of her collected work -- between Sweden, England, and the United States -- has meant she remains a figure known primarily to specialist collectors rather than the wider art market.
On Auctionist, 13 items by Lagerholm are recorded, spread across Crafoord Auktioner Malmö (9 items), Helsingborgs Auktionskammare, Kalmar Auktionsverk, Stadsauktion Sundsvall, and Auctionet. The auction record in the dataset is 1,600 SEK for a painted ceramic figurine signed Måna 2011, followed by 1,150 SEK for a wall-mounted painted ceramic sculpture from 1991. Works on paper -- gouaches, mixed media, and watercolors -- have sold in the 300--500 SEK range.