ArtistSwedish
Margareta Wallin
2 active items
Hilma Margareta Wallin was born on March 26, 1912 in Bringetofta, a village in Jönköpings county in Smaland. She grew up in this rural corner of southern Sweden before finding her way into the art world through a long and deliberate period of training that carried her from Halmstad to Florence to Paris.
Her formal artistic education began in the mid-1940s when she studied with Waldemar Lorentzon in Halmstad from 1945 to 1946. Lorentzon was a central figure in the Halmstad Group, the influential Swedish artist collective that had done much to introduce Surrealism and modernist currents into Swedish painting during the interwar years. Studying under him gave Wallin early contact with a thoroughly European conception of painting. From Halmstad she continued to the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence in 1948, adding a grounding in the Italian figurative tradition to her Swedish formation.
The most formative chapter of her career came when she settled in Paris from 1950 to 1956 and enrolled at the Academie Julian, where she studied with the Cubist theorist and painter Andre Lhote. Lhote was one of the most influential teachers of his generation, a painter who distilled Cubism into an accessible structural method and transmitted it to students from across Europe and beyond. His emphasis on underlying geometric structure, clear pictorial organization, and the flattening of form left a visible mark on many of his students, including Wallin. After Paris she made painting trips to Spain, Portugal, and Greece, continuing to expand her range of observed subjects.
Wallin worked almost exclusively in oil, producing still lifes, figure scenes, portraits, interiors, cityscapes, landscapes, and religious subjects. Her auction record shows works that include women with a violin, garden scenes, street views described as 'Gatukonstnär' (street artist), groups of figures in landscape, and quiet domestic interiors. She married Hadar Kylander in 1958 and thereafter sometimes signed works as Margareta Wallin-Kylander, the name under which she is also catalogued in Swedish art references.
She held solo exhibitions in Eksjö, Tranås, Malmö, Linköping, and several times in Eskilstuna, and participated in group exhibitions in Östersund, Sävsjö, and Köping. She died on July 30, 1990 in Stockholm's Oscars parish, aged 78. Her work continues to appear at Swedish auction houses, with Metropol in Stockholm among the houses that have handled her paintings.