ArtistSwedish
Olle Nyman
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Born on Christmas Eve 1909 at Duvnäs Gård in Saltsjö-Duvnäs outside Stockholm, Olle Nyman spent his entire life rooted to the same family estate his grandfather Robert Herman Küsel had purchased in 1863. That plot of ground - its walls, its soil, its accumulated debris - would eventually provide the raw material for one of the most distinctive bodies of work in twentieth-century Swedish art.
Nyman trained at Filip Månsson's painting school from 1926 to 1928, then entered the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, where he studied under Olle Hjortzberg from 1929 to 1934. The Academy formed him as a classicist: disciplined in composition, attentive to material, respectful of architectural context. Cézanne was an early touchstone, but over the following decades his palette and sensibility absorbed the light of Bonnard and the decorative force of Matisse. Working within a cubist framework, he built figure compositions and landscapes with restrained color harmonies, often anchored against gray tonal grounds.
His teaching career at the Royal Institute of Art, where he held a professorship from 1953 to 1963, made him an influential figure for a generation of Swedish artists. He led what colleagues called the Monumental School - a focus on getting art to work in dialogue with architecture rather than hang apart from it. The collaborations that followed bore this out: murals for Karolinska University Hospital in Solna, tapestries woven with Barbro Nilsson from the Märta Måås-Fjetterström studios for Borås Town Hall and the Swedish Ministry of Finance, ceiling paintings for Olaus Petri Church in Stockholm, a mosaic in natural stone for Södertälje Crematorium, and the scrap-metal sculpture "Sankt Göran, draken och prinsessan" at the Post Terminal in Tomteboda.
Around his own farm at Duvnäs, Nyman gathered a loose circle of artists in the early 1950s - the informal Saltsjö-Duvnäs group, which at various times included Evert Lundquist, Roland Kempe, and Torsten Renqvist. The place generated both friendship and a shared intensity of looking.
In the 1960s his practice shifted in an unexpected direction. Digging around the estate, Nyman began collecting the pottery shards, glass fragments, and porcelain pieces that had accumulated in the ground over centuries. He treated these as objets trouvés - archaeological misreadings, as he called them - and built them into collage sculptures using cement. The figures that emerged from this process were exhibited in a breakthrough show titled "Arkeologiska villfarelser" (Archaeological Misapprehensions) at Stockholm City Museum in 1966. The sculptures, assembled from what the earth had discarded, carried an odd tenderness: a bird, an elephant, a tennis player composed entirely of found fragments, held together by his hand and the weight of history.
The breadth of this practice - watercolor, oil, tapestry, mosaic, application, photography, collage sculpture, and public decoration - is preserved through the Kajsa and Olle Nyman Foundation for Culture, which has operated the studios and artist's home at Strandpromenaden 61 in Saltsjö-Duvnäs since 2007. His work is held at Nationalmuseum, Moderna Museet, Gothenburg Art Museum, Kalmar Art Museum, and in the collections of Örebro County Council.
On the secondary market, Nyman's work has appeared across a range of formats and media. His top results on Auctionet include the collage sculpture "Fågel" (objets trouvées) at SEK 17,060, "Gotlands landskapsvapen" at SEK 15,000, and a collage sculpture of an elephant at SEK 5,500. Active lots and past sales have been handled primarily through Stockholms Auktionsverk Magasin 5, Metropol, Stockholms Auktionsverk Sickla, and Gomér & Andersson Jönköping.