KunstenaarSwedish
Magnus Wijkström
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Magnus Wijkström was born in 1957 in Eslöv, a small town in Skåne in southern Sweden. From an early age he resisted the academic path laid out for him and chose instead to pursue art, enrolling in basic art education before being admitted to the five-year program at Konsthögskolan Valand in Gothenburg in 1983. He held his first exhibition during his student years.
After finishing his formal training, Wijkström settled back in Skåne and maintained a studio practice that was prolific but almost entirely private. Over the course of his life he completed more than a thousand paintings, working primarily in oil on panel and canvas, with some works in acrylic. The body of work displays a restless curiosity - a persistent searching for new modes of expression rather than any settling into a signature style. His paintings ranged from figurative scenes, including figures in parks and interior arrangements, to non-figurative compositions that explored geometry and color for their own sake.
He was not a self-promoter. Contemporaries and reviewers who encountered his work after his death described him as shy, someone who lacked both the inclination and the means to navigate the commercial and social machinery of the Swedish art world. Unable to sustain himself through sales alone, he worked in elder care to make ends meet. During his lifetime he showed in approximately thirty exhibitions, selling between five and ten paintings per year on average.
Wijkström died in 2019, leaving his Eslöv apartment filled with paintings that had never found buyers. The first posthumous exhibition at Galleri M in Eslöv in 2020 brought his work to broader local attention. Proceeds from that show and subsequent memorial exhibitions went to charitable causes including the Cancer Society and Operation Smile. A second memorial exhibition followed, described in the regional press as a tribute to a significant artist who had spent his career in a world too narrow to accommodate him.
His auction market presence reflects both the modesty of his commercial profile during his lifetime and the post-mortem revaluation that sometimes follows undiscovered artists. Of 45 items recorded on Auctionist, 33 have appeared at Skånes Auktionsverk and 8 at Bukowskis Malmö, with a small number at Bukowskis Stockholm. Almost all lots are paintings. Prices have remained very modest - the top results are Uppställning med nattygsbord (oil) at SEK 891 and I parken at SEK 601 - reflecting an artist whose secondary market is in its early stages. The concentration of sales in Skåne is consistent with his biography: a regional figure whose reputation is still largely local, with Bukowskis' involvement suggesting at least some institutional acknowledgment of his training and output.