KunstenaarSwedish
Maria Hillfon
4 actieve items
Maria Alexandra Hillfon (later Hillfon Samuelsson) was born on 20 August 1945 in Stockholm into a family that shaped her relationship to materials and making from early on. Her father Gösta Hillfon was an architect, her mother Hertha Hillfon one of Sweden's most significant ceramicists, and her brother Curt Hillfon also became an artist. Growing up in that environment meant that art was not a distant aspiration but a daily practice visible in the home and studio.
She studied at Konstfackskolan and then at Konsthögskolan (the Royal Institute of Art) in Stockholm from 1965 to 1971, receiving a thorough training in both fine art and graphic technique. After graduating she developed a practice that moves across several disciplines: lithography, serigraphy, painting, and textile art. Within that range, graphic printmaking became the field where she worked most consistently and to which her name is most closely attached.
Her prints are characterized by a tension between two distinct registers. On one side are the flower compositions and still lifes - warmly coloured works where poppies, mixed blooms, and vases of flowers fill the image plane with an intimate, attentive quality. On the other are the horizon works, where broad fields of colour are divided by a single horizontal line, pared down to near-abstraction. This pairing between the organic and the geometric, between the lush and the spare, runs through her entire printed output and also appears in her textile work. Lithographs such as "Stranden" and "Exotiska växter" and colour serigraphs of flower compositions have been produced in numbered editions ranging from small runs of 75 to larger editions of 290 or more.
Her public commissions give a sense of the scale the work can reach outside the print studio. She designed the chancel window of Mälarhöjden's Church in Stockholm, a commission that demanded both a mastery of colour and an understanding of architectural light. She also produced decorations for the restaurant of Nationalmuseum in Stockholm. Beyond these, her work appears in hospitals, courts, and county administration buildings across Sweden. Exhibitions have taken her to Konstnärshuset in Stockholm (1992), Landskrona Konsthall (2006 "Horisont" show), Ystad Konstmuseum, and internationally to Linz, Brussels, Mexico, Cuba, and Canada during the 1970s and 1980s. She received state work stipends in 1994 and 1995 and a state travel stipend to India in 1992.
Her work is held in a wide range of institutional collections: Nationalmuseum Stockholm, Göteborgs Konstmuseum, Malmö Konstmuseum, Ystad Konstmuseum, Helsingborgs Museum, Sundsvalls Museum, Regionmuseum Kristianstad, Nordenfjeldske Kunstindustrimuseum in Trondheim, and several Swedish county councils. At Auctionist, 38 lots have been recorded, with the majority passing through southern Swedish houses including Garpenhus Auktioner, Höörs Auktionshall, Auktionskammaren Sydost Kalmar, and Höganäs Auktionsverk. Prices on the secondary market are modest - the top recorded result is 1,000 SEK for a signed and numbered lithograph titled "Stranden" - which is typical for Swedish graphic multiples of this period and edition size, where the work's primary home has always been institutional and public collections rather than the auction room.