ArtistSwedish
Ulla Kraitz
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Ulla Kraitz was born in Stockholm in 1936 and trained at Konstfack from 1954 to 1958, followed by a period of art studies in Spain. That combination of Swedish craft education and southern European exposure surfaces throughout her work - a formal rigour softened by something warmer and less predictable. In 1961 she married the ceramicist Gustav Kraitz, and the two settled in Förslöv in Skåne, where they built a shared studio and a wood-fired kiln based on ancient Chinese models.
The kiln is central to understanding what Ulla Kraitz makes. She and Gustav fire it five or six times a year using wood and coal, a process that takes days and produces results that cannot be fully controlled. The glazes she works with - temmoku (the iron-rich brown-black), celadon, intense cobalt blue, and sang-de-boeuf (oxblood red) - were developed with the ceramics of the Chinese Ming and Song dynasties as a reference point. Not as copies but as a conversation across centuries about what fire, clay, and mineral oxide can produce when handled with patience and accumulated knowledge.
Her output spans sculptural ceramics, paintings, and mixed-media works. Among the sculptures, animals occupy a particular place. Horses, bulls, and wild boars rendered in glazed stoneware at scales that move between intimate and monumental. The forms are simplified to their essentials without tipping into pure abstraction - recognisably an animal, but stripped of anecdote. Alongside the figurative work she has pursued a more painterly and collage-based practice, working with watercolour and mixed media on paper and canvas.
Public collections holding her work include Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, Skissernas Museum, the Museum of Ceramics in Westerwald, Germany, and the National Museum in Budapest. The first joint exhibition with Gustav was at the Röhsska Museum in Gothenburg in 1965, a relationship with major Scandinavian institutions that has continued ever since. The Smithsonian Institution presented a survey of their ceramics in Washington, as did the San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts in Texas. In 2021 the couple opened RAVINEN Kulturhus in Norrviken, Båstad - a gallery project three decades in the making, built on the Bjäre Peninsula they have lived on throughout their careers.
In 2008 Ulla Kraitz was awarded the Illis Quorum of the 8th class, and in 2017 she and Gustav received H.M. the King's Medal on National Day for their contributions to Swedish ceramic art. On Auctionist, 18 lots have passed through the database, with ceramics and porcelain leading the category breakdown, followed by sculptures and paintings. Bukowskis handles the majority of significant pieces. The top realized price in the database is 20,000 SEK for a stoneware horse from the Förslöv studio, with an attaché case sculpture and a mixed-media composition also in the upper range. Her market sits at the intersection of applied art and sculpture, which tends to attract buyers from both sides.