KunstenaarSwedish
Elis Ryberg
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Stockholm's old town shows up in Elis Ryberg's paintings the way a regular sees it - not as a postcard, but as a set of familiar corners with their own weight and light. Riddarhuset, Stortorget, Slottsbacken, Mamsell Josabeth's stairs on Södermalm - these are the coordinates of a city-life observed closely and painted without pretense.
Ryberg was born in Stockholm in 1919 and lived most of his life there before moving to Ystad in southern Sweden, where he died in 1985. He never attended an art school. His painting was self-taught, and that fact is audible in the work: the perspective is slightly flattened, the figures inhabit space with a directness that formal training might have trained away. His drawing is careful - the compositions have a considered quality, not the rough improvisation sometimes associated with naive art.
He is classified as a naïvist, which in Swedish art history refers to a specific current of self-taught figurative painting that ran through the mid-twentieth century. Ryberg participated in group exhibitions of Nordic naivists in Stockholm in 1975 and 1976, placing his work within that conversation. His solo exhibitions at Galerie S:t Paul in Stockholm in 1967, 1970, 1980, and 1981 trace an active exhibition career spanning three decades. He also showed internationally, with exhibitions in London at Upper Street Gallery, and in Paris, Biarritz, and Florida.
The range of collections holding his work is notable for an artist working largely outside institutional channels. H.M. the King's collection includes his work, as does Statens Konstråd (the Swedish Arts Council), the Musee de Remiremont in France, and UNICEF offices in New York and Geneva. This spread suggests his appeal crossed the usual boundaries between Swedish domestic collecting and international audiences.
On Auctionist, Ryberg's work appears primarily as paintings and prints, sold across Metropol, Stockholms Auktionsverk, and several regional Swedish houses. His top auction result in the database is 10,500 SEK for a naïvist composition in oil on panel. Lithographs, often from editions of around 360, appear regularly and tend to sell in the range of 1,800-2,400 SEK.