ArtistSwedish
Rune Claesson
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Rune John Lennart Claesson was born on 15 February 1930 in Ulricehamn, a small town in Vastergotland that would remain his home and his primary subject for the whole of his life. He died there on 2 April 2011. His career as draughtsman, graphic artist and art educator spanned six decades, during which he built a body of work characterised by a dry, precise eye, subtle humour and an insistence on the local and the particular over any fashionable abstraction.
Claesson trained at Valand School of Fine Arts in Gothenburg from 1951 to 1955 under Endre Nemes, the Hungarian-born Surrealist painter who transformed Valand into one of the most intellectually alive art schools in Scandinavia. He then continued his studies at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm from 1956 to 1958. These two formative encounters gave Claesson a sound technical foundation in drawing and printmaking while exposing him to the European modernist tradition that Nemes carried with him into Sweden.
His practice was centred on drawing and graphic work in a distinctive personal blend of watercolour, pastels and charcoal. Landscapes, still lifes, portraits and interiors recur throughout his output, rendered with a spare intensity that makes even the most ordinary subject seem charged with quiet significance. His landscapes of the Vastergotland countryside, with bare birch trees against winter skies, became one of his most recognisable motifs. Etchings such as 'Fragment' (editions running to 260 impressions) and lithographs of tree-lined landscapes demonstrate a printmaker at ease with the demands of the medium.
Claesson taught at Hovedskous malskola in Gothenburg, at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, and at the Nordic Art School in Karleby, Finland during the 1970s and 1980s, making him a formative presence for a generation of Swedish and Nordic artists. He maintained studios in Ulricehamn throughout his life, including a self-designed wooden villa on Markusvägen that became something of a local landmark.
His work is held in the collections of Goteborgs konstmuseum, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Helsingborgs museum, Kalmar konstmuseum, Boras konstmuseum and Ulricehamns museum. The municipality of Ulricehamn has exhibited its own Claesson collection, a measure of the depth of his connection to the place that shaped him. Rune Claesson's art rewards patient looking: it is the work of a man who looked hard at the world around him and found there something worth recording with precision, feeling and the occasional wry aside.