ArtistSwedish
Ulf Lundell
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Ulf Gerhard Lundell was born on 20 November 1949 on Södermalm in Stockholm. He rose to cultural prominence in 1975 with his debut album Vargmåne and a year later with the semi-autobiographical novel Jack, establishing himself as one of Sweden's most enduring voices in rock music and literature. Over the following decades he published more than twenty books and released a long series of albums, but running alongside this literary and musical output was a sustained engagement with visual art.
Lundell began working seriously as a painter in the 1980s and has spoken openly about the role painting plays in his creative life: for him, the canvas is precisely where language stops. He has described wanting his pictures to be "cryptic, naive, contrary, non-artistic" - a deliberate rejection of polish in favour of direct emotional charge. His visual touchstones are the COBRA group, the Paris-based movement of the late 1940s that championed spontaneous brushwork and raw colour as a counter to Western academic convention. Domestically he has cited Erland Cullberg, the Swedish painter known for explosive, colour-saturated canvases, as a formative influence.
His practice spans oil and acrylic painting, works on paper, colour lithography, and serigraphy, often incorporating collage elements. Figurative and semi-abstract compositions sit side by side in his output, with recurring subjects including women, self-portraits, musical figures, and literary references - pieces titled after Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady reflect the beat-generation sensibility that has threaded through his writing and music as well. Works such as "Inför Striden" (2017, acrylic on canvas) and "Självporträtt med ripa" (mixed media with collage) show the range between expressive figuration and more gestural abstraction.
In 2015, Lundell opened Rockhead Art, a dedicated gallery on Fabriksgatan in Simrishamn on the Österlen coast of Skåne, where his paintings, drawings, and graphic editions are shown on a continuous basis. The gallery serves both as exhibition space and as a direct point of sale, with signed prints, original paintings, and limited editions available. He also sells work through Galleri Ö.K and other Swedish galleries, and his paintings and prints appear regularly at Swedish auction houses including Stockholms Auktionsverk and Crafoord Auktioner.
On the secondary market, Lundell's works circulate at modest prices consistent with his profile as a cultural figure whose visual art is appreciated by an audience that follows his broader work. At Auctionist, 38 lots have been recorded across Swedish houses including Stockholms Auktionsverk Sickla, Stockholms Auktionsverk Magasin 5, Crafoord Auktioner Stockholm, Garpenhus Auktioner, and Helsingborgs Auktionskammare. The highest recorded sale is 9,500 SEK for the oil "Han ställer frågor han inte kommer att få svar på" (2017), followed by 5,400 SEK for a floral still life in oil and 4,500 SEK for "Kvinna" (oil on canvas). Colour lithographs and serigraphs - many in limited editions of 75 to 200 - trade in the range of 800 to 3,000 SEK.