ArtistSwedish
Olle Skagerfors
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Olle Skagerfors was born on March 16, 1920 in Skövde, in the Swedish interior, and spent most of his working life in Gothenburg, where he died on September 5, 1997. His full name was Anders Olof Skagerfors, though he signed his work OS and was always known as Olle. He trained at Slöjdföreningens skola in Gothenburg from 1937 to 1940, then at Valands målarskola from 1940 to 1944 under painter Nils Nilsson - a teacher who encouraged individual expression rather than a fixed school style. Extended stays in France and England in the late 1940s and early 1950s broadened his visual range, and the first subjects he showed publicly, at Galleri God Konst in Gothenburg in 1950, already mixed French motifs with scenes from the Bohuslän coast.
Skagerfors was working in Gothenburg during a period when the city's art scene was marked by colorism - painters who had come up under Tor Bjurström at Valand in the 1920s and 1930s. He absorbed that emphasis on color as a carrier of feeling, but his path was quieter and more solitary. He distrusted artistic theory and worked from instinct, which made him productive in bursts and then intensely self-critical. He left behind a small body of work relative to his years of practice.
His painting moved across still lifes, coastal landscapes from the west coast - he spent summers around Tjörn, Marstrand, and Klädesholmen - and above all figures and portraits. He was drawn to people on the margins, and painted them with neither sentimentality nor distance. The series of self-portraits he produced across four decades stands as the most consistent thread in his practice: beginning with a woodcut titled Ögat (The Eye) in 1941, they trace his face with unsparing attention through different techniques, from oil and watercolor to charcoal, lithography, and etching.
Skagerfors held exhibitions at Göteborgs konstmuseum, Waldemarsudde in Stockholm, Thielska galleriet, and Skövde konsthall. A retrospective at Göteborgs konstmuseum in late 1999 then traveled to Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde in Stockholm in early 2000. His works are held in the collections of Göteborgs konstmuseum, Magasin III in Stockholm, and other institutional collections across Sweden.
At auction, Skagerfors appears regularly through the major Swedish houses. Bukowskis and Göteborgs Auktionsverk handle the bulk of his sales, with Stockholms Auktionsverk also active in this market. His paintings reach the highest prices - a still life with a jug sold for over 11,000 SEK - while works on paper, etchings, and lithographs sell in a lower range, often between 900 and 2,800 SEK. The market for his work is steady rather than volatile, reflecting consistent interest from collectors of post-war Swedish figurative painting.