KunstenaarSwedishgeb.1945
Majalisa Alexandersson
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Maria Kalise Majalisa Alexandersson was born on 22 November 1934 in Ås parish, Jämtland, and spent most of her adult life in Rönninge, south of Stockholm. She died in 2024 at the age of 89. Her path to sculpture was not a straight line. For three decades, from 1956 to 1986, she taught in Stockholm's arts education system at the compulsory school level, building a deep familiarity with form and material from the pedagogical side. It was only when she left teaching at 52 that she devoted herself fully to sculpture, a commitment that would sustain a practice of nearly forty years.
Alexandersson worked primarily with the human figure, using both bronze and fired clay as her materials. Her approach was direct and personal rather than monumental in ambition, focused on gesture, presence, and the particular quality of stillness that a well-made figurative sculpture can hold. Her public commissions bring this sensibility to civic spaces. In 1984, she completed "Det var en gång en trädgårdsmästare", a fired clay work installed at the City Library in Lidingö. A decade later, in 1993, she was invited by Eva Bonniers donationsfond to propose an outdoor work depicting Astrid Lindgren. Her proposal, "Poesi och förtrollning", was selected and unveiled in Tegnérlunden in 1996. The sculpture presents Lindgren as a storyteller surrounded by characters from her books, Peter and Petra, Göran and Mr. Liljonkvast, Ylva-Li among others. It has since become one of the more visited public artworks in central Stockholm. In 2004 she added another public bronze, "Jag ville jag vore en indian", installed at Lizzies torg in Huddinge centrum.
Her work in fired clay and bronze placed her within a tradition of Swedish figurative sculpture that values craft and human scale over abstraction or spectacle. The body of work she left suggests an artist who returned again and again to the same fundamental question: how a static object can convey the warmth or weight of a living person.
At auction, Alexandersson's work has appeared almost exclusively through Stockholms Auktionsverk Sickla, which accounts for 83 of her 86 recorded lots, with Metropol handling the remaining three. The market for her sculptures is modest but consistent. Her top recorded sale is 9,100 SEK for "Skulptur föreställande figur", followed by 5,150 SEK for "Stiliserad figur" and 4,850 SEK for "Tio År Sedan Sist". These price points reflect the secondary market for mid-career Swedish figurative sculptors whose public work carries more cultural weight than their auction footprint suggests.