KunstenaarSwedish
Hans Osswald
1 actieve items
Hans August Osswald was born on 29 August 1919 in Kungs-Barkarö, Västmanland, and died in Malmö in 1983. He worked as a painter and graphic artist across four decades, producing a body of work in oil, gouache, watercolour, mixed media, and woodcut that is unified by an interest in abstraction and primitive visual patterning. He also worked as a book illustrator.
Osswald made his public debut at Louis Hahne's art shop in Stockholm in 1947. Solo exhibitions followed in Örebro in 1951 and Kalmar in 1952. He participated in group shows with the Dalarna Art Association, exhibited at an ABF exhibition in Ludvika in 1951, and took part in the travelling Grafik och Skulptur exhibition in 1953. His printmaking was shown through Konstfrämjandet in Stockholm. This exhibition pattern places him within the postwar generation of Swedish artists who built careers through regional galleries, applied-arts venues, and touring shows rather than the commercial gallery circuit in the capital.
As a painter, Osswald worked most consistently on panel, which gave his layered oil surfaces a rigid, textured quality distinct from canvas. His compositions tend toward horizontal formats, often elongated, with colour fields and gestural marks organised into rhythmic structures rather than narrative imagery. Titles such as Komposition, Abstrakt komposition, and Blandteknik, abstrakt komposition reflect the formal orientation of his practice. At the same time, his work never became purely geometric: recurring motifs include fish, birds, trees, and houses rendered through a semi-primitive vocabulary that gives the paintings a material presence close to folk imagery or cave drawing. Works with more specific subjects also appear in the auction record: Fartygsmotiv shows ships treated as compositional elements, Snöstorm and Kvarnvägen give recognisable weather and landscape titles to otherwise abstracted fields, and a still life with apples shows that he worked across genres.
In woodcut, Osswald's earliest datable prints are from 1951, numbered within small editions (one is numbered 13/25). The woodcut format suited his interest in primitive mark-making and allowed the same motifs that appear in painting to be explored through the resistance of the block and the grain of the wood.
Osswald's work entered the collections of Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, The King's Graphic Collection (Kungliga Grafiska Samlingen), Malmö Museum, Eskilstuna Museum, Gävle Museum, and The Brooklyn Museum in New York. Museum representation across five institutions in Sweden and one in the United States reflects a career that, though not prominent in the commercial market, was taken seriously within public collecting contexts.
On the Nordic auction market, Osswald's paintings and prints appear regularly. Auctionist currently indexes 31 items across Swedish auction houses. Realised prices for oil paintings range from approximately SEK 350 for gouaches to SEK 2,400 for larger compositions, with most works trading between SEK 1,000 and SEK 1,300. The work circulates across a wide range of houses including Stockholms Auktionsverk, Bukowskis Market, and regional rooms.