ArtistSwedish
Owe Wessbohn
0 active items
Owe Emanuel Wessbohn was born on October 9, 1913 in Malmö, a city that shaped both his craft and his aesthetic instincts. His path into art began not with paint but with stone and ink: he trained first as a professional lithographer, acquiring a precision and patience with surfaces that would carry through his entire career. Drawing classes under Jules Schyl at Malmö Technical School between 1930 and 1934 gave him a firm academic grounding before his focus turned to painting.
The 1940s brought a concentrated period of formal study. Wessbohn enrolled at Skånska målarskolan in 1944 and 1945, then crossed to Copenhagen in 1946 to study under Axel Smith. The following year he reached Paris, where he attended both Académie Léger and Académie Colarossi - two studios that shaped a generation of Scandinavian artists who passed through the French capital in the postwar years. Fernand Léger's school in particular drew painters interested in form and structure rather than pure impressionism, and that tension between construction and observation is visible in Wessbohn's surviving work.
Besides his studio practice, Wessbohn worked as a lithographic draughtsman and taught drawing on a periodic basis. His travel notebooks fed directly into his art: he made extensive trips to the Netherlands, Spain and Italy, and the motifs - cobbled squares, moored boats, urban figures, bullfighting arenas glimpsed in Spain - reappear across his oils and prints. His range of subjects runs from intimate portraits and figure studies to open landscapes and city views, with recurring attention to the human presence in built and natural environments.
He exhibited independently on multiple occasions in Malmö, and showed work in Linköping, Norrköping, Enköping and Umeå. In Stockholm he appeared at Galerie Æsthetica and participated in the capital's salon exhibitions at Liljevalchs Art Hall. He also showed jointly with the painter Sten Faste in Kristianstad and contributed to several exhibitions organised by Skåne Art Association in Lund and Malmö. His work entered the collections of Malmö Museum, Ystad Museum and the City of Stockholm. He died on August 6, 1996 in Bjärred.
On the Nordic auction market, Wessbohn surfaces primarily at Örebro Stadsauktioner, which accounts for the large majority of his 37 recorded lots on Auctionist. Works include oil on canvas, oil on panel, lithographs and pencil drawings - much as his exhibited output would suggest. Signed works with legible dates from the 1950s through the late 1970s appear regularly. His top recorded hammer price reached 3,952 SEK for an abstract landscape, reflecting his position as a solid secondary-market figure within Swedish regional collecting.