KunstenaarSwedish
Evy Låås
7 actieve items
Evy Ebba Kristina Låås was born on 2 October 1923 in Sånga-Säby, Stenhamra, in the Mälaren archipelago west of Stockholm, and she spent nearly her entire life at the family property Solsäter in that same landscape. She began formal art training at seventeen, enrolling at the Tekniska skolan in Stockholm, then moving through Edvin Ollers' atelier and Otte Sköld's painting school before gaining admission to Konstakademien, where she studied from 1949 to 1955. Sköld, who would go on to become the founding director of Moderna Museet, ran a school that stood at the intersection of French modernist color thinking and Swedish figurative tradition - Låås absorbed both.
What distinguished her output from the beginning was an unusual breadth of subject and medium. Working in oil, watercolor, and color lithography, she moved easily between interior still lifes, garden scenes, cats observed through windows, and expansive Nordic landscapes from Bohuslän and Lapland. The cats in particular became a signature: she often drew them from inside her home due to a physical disability, developing a method of extended looking through glass that gave her images an unusual quality of arrested motion - the animal caught in the instant before it turns.
In 1951, before most Swedish artists of her generation had left Europe for fieldwork, Låås traveled to Africa and spent time living inside wildlife reserves, drawing directly from observation among the animals. These trips produced drawings and paintings of a directness that impressed her contemporaries. She returned repeatedly, and out of those experiences grew a literary collaboration with the author Inga Borg that produced several picture books, including Teckningar från savannen (Drawings from the Savanna), Dagar med Simba (Days with Simba), and Giraffen kan inte sova (The Giraffe Cannot Sleep). The books reached a generation of Swedish children with images drawn from firsthand encounter rather than zoological reference.
She had her first solo exhibition in 1956 at Galerie Blanche in Stockholm and continued exhibiting throughout her active decades. Her work entered the permanent collections of Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, Moderna Museet, and the Royal Swedish Collections - a breadth of institutional representation that placed her firmly within the canon of mid-century Swedish graphic art, though she remained less visible than some contemporaries.
Låås died on 6 April 1999 in Stenhamra, the same locality where she had been born and lived. Her color lithographs - particularly garden subjects and the cat at the window motifs - are the works most frequently encountered at Swedish auction houses today. Records from Auctionist show 51 lots across regional houses including Halmstads Auktionskammare, Borås Auktionshall, and Göteborgs Auktionsverk. Top realized prices have reached 1,456 SEK for a signed garden lithograph (20/360) and 1,302 SEK for a flower still life in oil on canvas. The auction market for her work is active at a regional level, with works regularly appearing across western Sweden.