ArtistSwedish
Sixten Fager
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Sixten Fager was born Anders Sixten Fager on 20 May 1920 in Ekträsk, Västerbotten - a rural parish deep in northern Sweden's forest interior. The landscape of that region, its birch forests, mountain ridges, and seasonal light, would define his work for the next nine decades. For much of his adult life he worked as a locomotive driver on the Swedish railways while painting in his spare time, a double life that is itself a distinctly Swedish story of working-class self-cultivation.
His formal training came from Académie Libre in Stockholm, where he also received guidance from the Umeå-born painter Carl Magnus Lindqvist. The academic foundation gave Fager technical grounding, but his sensibility moved decisively toward expressionism - colour and texture pushed to amplify feeling over description. He made his public debut at an exhibition in 1954, and in 1967 left railway work entirely to become a full-time artist, setting up his studio in a timber cabin in Gumboda, a village just outside Umeå.
Fager's subject matter was narrow and consistent: the Västerbotten mountain landscape in its different seasons, particularly autumn. Titles like "Höstdag i Kitteldalen" (Autumn Day in Kitteldalen) and "Tidig höst" (Early Autumn) recur throughout his catalogue. He worked primarily in oil on canvas and watercolour on paper, and from the 1980s onwards increasingly in colour lithography. Over time his handling of motifs grew more abstract - contours loosening, colour relationships becoming the primary carrier of meaning - while the roots in actual northern terrain remained legible.
His public commissions included decorative works for Umeå Hospital (Umeå lasarett) and Centrumhuset in Robertsfors. He received a State Work Grant (statens arbetsstipendium) and the Kiruna Grant, recognitions that placed him within a broader tradition of state-supported regional artists. The Swedish king visited his studio in Gumboda, an event captured in press photographs that became a minor piece of local cultural history. Fager died on 31 May 2010 in Bonässund, Ångermanland, just eleven days after turning ninety.
On the secondary market, Fager's work appears most consistently at regional Swedish auction houses, particularly Norrlands Auktionsverk and Södermanlands Auktionsverk, which together account for the majority of his 26 indexed lots on Auctionist. Top recorded prices have reached 2,900 SEK for an oil, with watercolours and lithographs typically trading between 300 and 800 SEK. His market is regional and modest, but his presence across multiple northern houses reflects a genuine rootedness in Norrland collecting.