ArtistSwedish
Nisse Zetterberg
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At Rinkeby metro station in Stockholm, passengers descend into a rust-red cave lined with gleaming gold mosaics depicting Viking Age artefacts excavated from the surrounding area. Nisse Zetterberg designed and executed these mosaics together with two colleagues, and they were inaugurated in 1975. The project exemplifies a career built equally on intimate studio work and large-scale public decoration - a combination unusual among his generation of Swedish painters.
Born Nils Harald Zetterberg on 21 November 1910 in Stockholm, he came from an artistic family: his father, Albert Zetterberg, gave him his first formal training between 1925 and 1929, and his brother Olle became an architect. He then studied at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm from 1929 to 1933, working under Albert Engström, Olle Hjortzberg, and Birger Simonsson. In 1930 he was awarded the chancellor's medal, and in 1933 the royal medal - the academy's two highest student honours.
His paintings range across portraits, nudes, landscapes, and still lifes, and he worked in oil, watercolour, and a variety of graphic techniques including etching and lithography. His prints, many produced in editions of 200 to 360, show the same disciplined attention to composition that characterises his paintings - subjects like flowers, fruit, harbour views, and Stockholm cityscapes rendered with quiet authority. A view of Södermalm sold at Bukowskis in 2013 for the equivalent of around 5,400 USD, the highest recorded auction result for his work.
For much of his later career Zetterberg taught at Konstfack, Sweden's national art and design university, where he held the position of head teacher in mural painting. He passed on to generations of students a tradition that linked the decorative arts to monumental painting - skills he had refined through his own public commissions. He died on 24 February 1986 in Stockholm.
His work is held in the Nationalmuseum, Moderna Museet, the Nordic Museum, Kalmar Art Museum, and King Gustaf VI Adolf's collection. On the Swedish auction market he appears most frequently at Metropol and Halmstads Auktionskammare, with paintings and colour lithographs making up the majority of his 23 indexed lots on Auctionist. Prices are accessible, with oil paintings from the 1950s typically selling in the low to mid thousands of kronor.