ArtistSwedish
Olle Hermansson
2 active items
Olle Hermansson belongs to a largely undocumented chapter of Swedish mid-century industrial design - the small cohort of artists and craftspeople who worked directly with manufacturers to bring sculptural ambition into functional household objects. His collaboration with Husqvarna, the Jönköping-based industrial giant whose foundry operations were among the most significant in Sweden, produced a distinctive body of cast iron work that sits at the intersection of applied art and decorative sculpture.
Hermansson's designs for Husqvarna are concentrated in fireplace accessories: gnistskydd (spark guards), brasgaller (fire grates), and eldhundar (firedogs). The pieces are signed with his monogram "OH" and cast in blackened iron with the Husqvarna mark. What distinguishes them from purely functional foundry work is the deliberate sculptural program running through each design. Hermansson drew repeatedly from Norse mythology, giving form to figures such as Thor with his goats Tanngrisnir and Tanngnjóstr, Viking ships rendered in openwork iron, and stylized animal forms.
His most circulated design is the firedog called "Räven" (The Fox) - a crouching, abstracted fox form that bridges the Swedish craft tradition with the rougher visual language of mid-century Brutalism. The piece reflects a design sensibility common to Scandinavian industrial art of the 1960s: the search for a modern idiom grounded in preindustrial myth and material directness. Cast iron was not a prestige material in the way that ceramics or silver were, which made work like Hermansson's quietly countercultural within the design world of its time.
The fireplace screens and decorative grates represent a more complex formal challenge. Some feature dense openwork compositions depicting scenes from Norse legend, requiring both foundry skill and a sculptor's understanding of negative space. These pieces were also produced in collaboration with Norrahammars Bruk, a foundry within the Husqvarna group, suggesting that Hermansson's relationship with the company extended across different production sites.
Hermansson's output sits within the broader Scandinavian design movement that sought to bring artistic quality into everyday domestic objects - a tradition associated with figures like Stig Lindberg at Gustavsberg and Carl-Harry Stålhane at Rörstrand. His medium was less fashionable, but the instinct was the same: that good design and good art need not occupy separate spaces in the home.
On the Nordic auction market, Hermansson's cast iron objects appear regularly at Swedish houses. Auctionist's database records 27 items, with Bukowskis Stockholm and Stockholms Auktionsverk among the primary venues. Top recorded prices reach 9,000 SEK for a gnistskydd and 5,500 SEK for the "Räven" firedog, reflecting steady collector demand for quality mid-century Swedish industrial design.