KunstenaarSwedish
Johan Lundgren
1 actieve items
The landscape around Nordingrå, a peninsula on the High Coast of Ångermanland, has drawn artists for generations. What draws them is the particular quality of the light there - the way the Baltic sea and the granite ridges interact, the dense northern forest giving way suddenly to open water. Johan Lundgren spent much of his working life returning to that landscape, making it the subject of paintings and prints that track the rhythms of agricultural and forestry labor as much as the scenery itself.
Lundgren was born on April 17, 1920, in Umeå. He came to painting through formal training that began relatively late: he studied at Otte Sköld's painting school in 1947, then continued at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm from 1948 to 1953. Study trips to France, Spain, and Italy during those years gave him exposure to the European traditions that were then being absorbed and reprocessed by the generation of Swedish painters working in the postwar period.
His subject matter was grounded in Norrland - frontier landscapes, forest interiors, log hauling with horses, rural interiors. The work belongs to a tradition of Swedish landscape painting that resists purely aesthetic contemplation in favor of depicting actual labor and actual terrain. His friend and fellow painter Thage Nordholm shared similar preoccupations, and the two are often discussed together as artists whose identity was shaped by and inseparable from the High Coast region. Exhibitions followed consistently through the 1950s: a solo show in Sundsvall in 1956, an exhibition at De Ungas Salong in Stockholm in 1958, and repeated participation in group shows organized by Sveriges Allmänna Konstförening and Riksförbundet för bildande konst.
Lundgren worked across oil painting, watercolor, and color lithography. The prints - often depicting forest scenes, log haulage, and rural work - gave his imagery a broader circulation and are now the pieces most commonly appearing at auction. His paintings tend to reach higher prices when they do appear. He died in Stockholm in 1989.
His work is held in public collections at Moderna museet in Stockholm, Kalmar konstmuseum, the collections of Örebro County Council, and the Gustaf V Adolf collection. A permanent exhibition of his paintings has been maintained at Mannaminne since 1991. On Auctionist, 35 works are recorded, with 3 currently active. The market is concentrated in northern Swedish auction houses - Norrlands Auktionsverk accounts for 17 of the 35 lots. Top prices include 11,000 SEK for an oil on canvas titled "Vilostund" and 4,600 SEK for a Nordingrå landscape. A color lithograph reached 850 EUR at one sale, reflecting stronger European interest in the graphic work.