KunstenaarSwedish
Anita Nylund
2 actieve items
Anita Gunvor Nylund-Hedlund was born in 1931 into one of Sweden's most interconnected artistic families. Her father, Gunnar Nylund, was artistic director at Rörstrand for decades and one of the defining figures of Swedish mid-century ceramics. Her grandfather Felix Nylund was a Finnish painter and sculptor. Growing up surrounded by clay and glaze, kiln schedules and critical discussions about form, Nylund did not simply inherit a trade - she grew up inside one.
She trained rigorously and broadly. Her first formal studies were at Otte Sköld's painting school in Stockholm, one of the more respected independent ateliers of the postwar period. She then went to Denmark, continued at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and later studied at the Academy of Art in Florence. While in France, she worked directly in a ceramics factory, learning production processes from the inside. On returning to Sweden, she undertook practical training in ceramic painting at Rörstrand's porcelain factory in Lidköping - the house her father had shaped for a generation.
In 1956 she joined Jie Johnson AB in Gantofta, a small Scanian manufacturer of flintware and earthenware that was at the time building out its range of painted household ceramics. She stayed until 1964, and those eight years produced the work she is best remembered for. Her designs for JIE Gantofta were cheerful, narrative, and often built around cast characters: "Familjen Pepparsson" (the Pepparsson family) brought anthropomorphic spice containers to Swedish kitchens, each piece a small figure with its own personality. "Vår lilla stad" (Our little town) applied a similar approach to storage jars, each shaped like a building from a compact, imagined townscape. "Pyttan och Pullan" and "Janssons frestelse" were among the other named series. The pieces were made from flintware with polychrome hand decoration and often fitted with teak wooden lids.
Parallel to her work at JIE Gantofta, Nylund designed for Rörstrand and Royal Copenhagen and worked with Eneryda glassworks. She was not a single-manufacturer designer but someone who moved between different material traditions - porcelain, earthenware, glass - while keeping a recognisable visual sensibility across them. After leaving Gantofta, she eventually settled in Staffanstorp and operated her own studio and retail space, Konst och Design GAN, from the early 1980s. She died in 2023 at age 92. Her work is held at Helsingborgs Museum.
On Auctionist, Nylund's market is almost entirely ceramics: 28 of 31 catalogued items fall under ceramics and porcelain. The auction geography is spread across southern Sweden, with Helsingborgs Auktionskammare, Stadsauktion Sundsvall, and Falun Auktionsbyrå among the most active venues. Top recorded prices include 2,600 SEK for a set of "Kryddgården" spice jars and 1,500 SEK for an egg dish from the "Pyttan" series with teak lid. The JIE Gantofta pieces remain actively collected, particularly the complete named sets.