KunstenaarSwedish
Gunnar Kanevad
3 actieve items
For over sixty years, one of the workshops in Gamla Linköping - the open-air museum in the center of the city - belonged to Gunnar Kanevad. He opened Träsnideriet there in 1962 and kept carving until late in his life, producing a body of work that ranged from pine mirrors and wall reliefs to naturalistic animal figures and interlocking wood puzzles. His approach was figural and often playful, but always grounded in serious craft: he worked across pine, oak, and other Swedish timber species, drawing on the grain and character of each material.
Kanevad was born on 6 May 1930 in Horn, a small community in southern Östergötland. He was entirely self-taught, which shaped how he developed - not through an academic program but through years of daily practice and close attention to what wood would and would not do. Horn and later Linköping remained the anchor points of his life; he died on 2 November 2019 in Vreta Kloster, not far from where he had worked for decades.
His breakthrough came with "Familjen Linné", a figural wood work that attracted attention in the design press, including coverage in the journal Form. Public commissions followed, eventually including work for SPP, Utö Wärdhus, Gyllenforsskolan in Gislaved, Regionsjukhuset in Linköping, the Postens regionförvaltning in Linköping, and - notably - Vnukovo Airport in Moscow. That last commission placed his work in an international transit space visited by millions, a long way from the small workshop on the museum grounds.
Kanevad is represented in the collections of Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, Östergötlands läns landsting, Västmanlands läns landsting, and in King Gustaf VI Adolf's private collection. The breadth of institutional holding is significant for a self-taught craftsperson working primarily in a regional context: it shows that his work was taken seriously at the highest levels of Swedish collecting.
At auction, his work trades primarily as sculptures, mirrors, and decorative wall reliefs - the DB shows 18 sculpture lots, 5 mirrors, and 5 miscellaneous, totaling 34 items. Sales are concentrated at Linköping and Norrköping houses, particularly Gomér and Andersson, which reflects strong local market interest. The top auction result is 5,000 SEK for a pine mirror from 1981, followed by 900 SEK for a large wall relief of a Skipper butterfly. Prices remain modest relative to his public collection presence, suggesting auction buyers are still primarily drawn from a regional rather than national collector base.