KunstenaarSwedish
Åke Wickström
2 actieve items
Ake Wickstrom was born on 27 January 1927 in Vekerum, Morrums socken, in the province of Blekinge in southern Sweden. His father worked as a decorative painter, and a feeling for craft and color was present in the household from the start. His brother Oskar would also become an artist. Wickstrom himself did not pursue painting as a profession until his mid-thirties, spending the years before that working in construction. The late start gave his work a grounded quality that book-trained painters sometimes lack.
In 1952, while still working outside the art world professionally, Wickstrom studied at Skanska Malarskolan in Malmo under teachers Helge Nielsen, Arwid Karlsson, and Eskil Skans. He supplemented this foundation through extended travel: Italy, France, Denmark, Africa, and Paris all left traces in his understanding of light and composition. By 1963 he had transitioned fully to painting as his primary occupation, and the decades that followed produced a body of work rooted firmly in the everyday life of Blekinge.
The subjects that define his output are intimate and local: birthday dances, Christmas church walks, evening parties, figures moving through landscapes at night, and the particular quality of indoor gatherings set against cold exterior darkness. His style sits at the intersection of naturalism and naivism, the figures are not academically rendered, but they carry genuine weight, and his use of color, often applying bold tones with a palette knife, gives his canvases a directness that more refined techniques sometimes lose.
Wickstrom received commissions that placed his work in permanent public settings. He painted altarpieces for Berga church and Navelsjo church, and his work is held in the collections of Vikingsberg Museum in Helsingborg and Broby Museum. He died on 4 April 2019, having painted actively for more than five decades.
In the auction market, Wickstrom appears almost exclusively as a painter, with 97 of his 98 recorded lots catalogued as paintings. Prices cluster at a modest level typical for Swedish provincial painters with a loyal but contained collector base: top results include an oil called Fodelse-dags-dans at 1,712 SEK. The houses where his work appears most consistently are Vaxjo Auktionskammare, Auktionshuset Thelin and Johansson, and Ekenbergs, all operating in the Gotaland region.