ArtistSwedish
Per Svensson
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Per Svensson was born in Lund in 1935 and spent most of his working life in southern Sweden, the region that would shape both his training and his subject matter. He received his formal education at Grafikskolan Forum in Malmö, the printmaking school founded in 1964 by ABF under the direction of Bertil Lundberg - a figure central to the development of Swedish printmaking in the postwar decades. The school, rooted in Malmö's working-class cultural milieu, placed technical rigour alongside a tradition of socially and naturalistically engaged imagery.
Svensson emerged early as one of the school's strongest voices. His signature came quickly: images built from the insect world, above all grasshoppers and earwigs, rendered with precision and a certain unsettling calm. These were not illustrations of nature but explorations of form, structure, and presence. Working primarily in aquatint, hard and soft-ground etching, and flatbiting, he developed a printmaking practice in which the physical properties of the medium - the bitten surface, the layered tone, the transferred pressure - were integral to the meaning of each composition.
Over time the motifs expanded. Forms drawn from architecture, the plant kingdom, and the human figure entered his work, but always transformed, always pushed toward something more ambiguous. At Krognoshuset in Lund, where he exhibited as part of the Aura artists' group, viewers encountered graphic image worlds built from suggestive shapes that hovered between the recognisable and the invented. His paintings developed in parallel: in them, graphic forms broke free of their printed origins and became what he called 'stone flowers' - relief-like surfaces bearing traces of both plant and animal life.
The scope of his institutional representation is notable for a printmaker working primarily in the Swedish provinces. His works entered the collection of the British Museum in London, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Bradford City Art Gallery, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and the National Gallery of Art in Sofia - a span that speaks to the international circulation of Swedish graphic art during the 1960s and 1970s. In Sweden, his prints have passed regularly through auction houses in Skane, including Crafoord Auktioner in Lund and auction venues in Helsingborg and Höganäs.
Svensson died in Malmö in 2016. Among his auction appearances, the colour lithograph series 'Den drömda Trädgården' (The Dreamed Garden) represents his range as a colourist alongside the predominantly monochromatic etching work for which he is best known.