KunstenaarSE
Erling Johansson
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Erling Johansson grew up in Sarvisvaara, a small settlement in Gällivare municipality in Swedish Lapland, where meänkieli was the mother tongue and Laestadian faith shaped daily life so strictly that painting, singing, and music were forbidden. He left for Stockholm to study at the Royal Institute of Art from 1956 to 1961, then continued at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki from 1962 to 1963, and travelled further on study trips to Russia, Greece, and Italy. The tension between his origins and his chosen vocation ran through his work for the rest of his life.
His portraits are immediately recognizable: faces and figures broken into colored facets that suggest the layering of inner life rather than a fixed outer appearance, treating each sitter's energy as something visible and paintable. He worked across oil, pastel, and printmaking - etchings and aquatints among them - and also made experimental short films, including "Anima Mundi" (1967), "Expulsi" (1970), and "Sagan om Skade" (2004). His public commissions placed monumental works in Stockholm, Kiruna, Malmberget, Haparanda, Boden, and Gällivare. He taught portrait painting at Gerlesborgsskolan for fifteen years. In 2007 he was appointed honorary doctor at Luleå University of Technology. He died on 5 September 2023 in Umeå.
At auction, Johansson's work has appeared primarily through northern Swedish houses: Norrlands Auktionsverk, Gomér & Andersson in Linköping, Auctionet, and Stockholms Auktionsverk. Self-portraits and figure studies in oil fetch the highest results, with a self-portrait from 1993 reaching 5,000 SEK and a pastel portrait achieving 4,100 SEK. His etchings and prints also circulate regularly.