ArtistSwedish
Måns Rossander
1 active items
Måns Rossander was born in 1944 and has spent most of his life in Mellby on Öland, the long Baltic island off the southeastern coast of Sweden. The island's distinctive terrain - the flat limestone plain of the Great Alvar, the coastal wetlands, the stubble fields at harvest time - has shaped virtually his entire body of work. He studied as an external student at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm under sculptor and professor Bror Marklund between 1961 and 1964, a training that grounded him in traditional techniques without pulling him away from the regional identity he had already committed to.
Rossander works primarily in oil on canvas, building up his Öland subjects with a direct, unhurried touch. The Great Alvar (Alvaret) recurs throughout his career as a motif: the near-empty plateau with its low vegetation and wide sky represents one of northern Europe's most unusual landscapes and has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2000. Alongside these expansive compositions he is also known for paintings of pumpkins and autumn harvests that have given him a public identity well beyond gallery circles - his harvest motifs have appeared on the official posters for Öland's annual Skördefest (harvest festival) for many years.
From the late 1980s Rossander extended his practice into textile design, creating rug designs that carry something of the same compositional sensibility found in his paintings. A long friendship and creative partnership with the Swedish flautist and musician Björn J:son Lindh produced a joint CD box set for which Rossander contributed the lithograph on the cover - one example of his willingness to move between fine art and applied contexts. His work has been shown at galleries in the Kalmar region and is held in collections associated with local institutions.
On the Nordic auction market Rossander is a modestly traded regional artist. His work turns up almost exclusively at auction houses serving Kalmar County - Kalmar Auktionsverk, Auktionskammaren Sydost Kalmar, Auktionsfirma Kenneth Svensson i Kalmar, and Auktionshuset Thelin and Johansson - reflecting a collector base concentrated close to Öland. The 11 items recorded on Auctionist include oil landscapes of Alvaret and Öland coastal scenes, with the highest documented sale being 2,606 SEK for 'Tidig höst' (Early Autumn). Prices remain accessible, placing him comfortably within the market for dedicated regional landscape painting.