ArtistPolish-Swedish
Tadeusz Kamasa
2 active items
Tadeusz Kamasa was born on 22 September 1924 in Poznań, Poland. He trained at the Academy of Art in Krakow, receiving a grounding in the figurative tradition that Polish academies of the period maintained through drawing, portrait painting, and compositional study. By 1944, amid the upheaval of the Second World War, he left Poland and settled in Sweden - a country where he would spend the rest of his life.
Once in Sweden, Kamasa continued his formal education. In 1950 he enrolled at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, immersing himself in the Swedish art environment of the postwar years. He also made study trips to Italy, Denmark, and Norway, exposing himself to a range of landscape traditions and painting cultures. Italy in particular seems to have remained an important point of reference - he exhibited there on multiple occasions and in 1967 received a gold medal at an exhibition in Turin for his landscape work.
His practice centred on oil painting throughout his career. The subjects he returned to most consistently were landscapes, portraits, still lifes, and figure studies, with scenes of people - children playing, women seated or standing - appearing regularly alongside coastal views and park settings. The handling is direct and the palette tends toward warmth, with gestural marks suggesting a post-impressionist sensibility rather than strict realism. Works signed simply "Kamasa" circulate across the Swedish secondary market.
In Sweden, Kamasa participated in exhibitions with the Norra Smålands Art Association and held solo shows in Tranås, a town in Jönköping County in the south of the country, suggesting he was rooted in the provincial exhibition circuit of central Sweden rather than the Stockholm gallery world. He died in Sweden in 2003, aged 78.
On the auction market, Kamasa's work appears most often at smaller regional Swedish houses. The 21 items in the Auctionist database are exclusively paintings, with Halmstads Auktionskammare and Gomér and Andersson accounting for the majority. Realised prices are modest: the top recorded sale in our data is 800 SEK for an oil on canvas, with most works selling in the 300-600 SEK range. His broader international auction history includes a record of 323 USD for "Spanish Dancer" at Desa Unicum in 2016, pointing to occasional interest among collectors of Polish diaspora artists.