KunstenaarSwedish
Bengt Ellis
1 actieve items
Bengt Ellis was born on March 29, 1923 in Spånga, outside Stockholm, and spent the formative decades of his life moving toward the mountains and wild landscapes that would define his entire output. He began painting seriously at eighteen, then studied at Edvard Berggren's and Edvin Oller's painting schools in Stockholm before making his exhibition debut at Värmlands Museum in Karlstad in 1950. That debut set the tone for a career that was always rooted in direct observation of extreme environments.
Härjedalen became his primary subject and, eventually, his permanent home. Together with his wife, textile artist Gunilla Ellis, he settled in Funäsdalen, where they took over sculptor Bror Marklund's former summer studio and converted it into Elliseum, an atelier and gallery that also functioned as a meeting point for artists and visitors passing through the fjäll. The couple worked side by side for decades, each in their own discipline, and the studio became as much a part of his identity as the paintings themselves.
The mountains in his work are not postcard scenery. Ellis painted the same landscapes across different seasons and light conditions - spring melt, the particular amber of a burning autumn, deep winter silences at high altitude - returning to the same motifs with the patience of someone who understood that the mountains changed meaning depending on the hour and the weather. He worked in both oil and watercolour, with oil being the primary medium for his most ambitious compositions. Works like "Brinnande höst i Härjedalen" and "Vårvinter i Björnlandet" illustrate his ability to charge a Nordic landscape with emotional weight without resorting to sentimentality.
His geographic reach extended far beyond Scandinavia. He traveled repeatedly to Canada, Alaska, Ecuador, Peru, Spain, Morocco, Indonesia, and the Windward Islands of the Caribbean, always in the company of Gunilla and their children. These journeys fed directly into the work, and Ellis was disciplined enough to transform them into two illustrated travel books: "Landet närmast solen", an account of travels in Ecuador, and "Glödande öar i Karibien", covering the Caribbean archipelago, both published by Norstedts. He also produced a book on painting technique. An auction listing for a Spanish work, "Blå Bodega, Spanien", and a "Sydländskt stadsbild" confirm that Mediterranean and tropical subjects appeared alongside the Scandinavian fjäll in his studio practice.
Exhibitions followed throughout his career: Ljusdals Museum (1964), Galleri Heland in Stockholm's Kungsträdgården (1970, 1972, 1976, 1981), Hälsinglands Museum in Hudiksvall (1984), and Röros Museum in Norway (1991, 1997). A retrospective was mounted at Jämtlands Läns Museum in Östersund in 2006, a year before his death on May 27, 2007, in Funäsdalen.
On the auction market, Bengt Ellis appears across the major Swedish houses. His 39 items on Auctionist have sold primarily at Stockholms Auktionsverk (Sickla and Magasin 5) and Stadsauktion Sundsvall, with Auktionshuset Kolonn and Auctionet also represented. The top recorded result in our database is 24,000 EUR for "Livsäterån", an oil on canvas with a motif from Funäsdalen. Other significant sales include 17,000 SEK for "Vårvinter i Björnlandet" and 15,412 SEK for "Brinnande höst i Härjedalen". All 39 items are categorized as paintings, reflecting the consistency of his primary medium throughout his career.