KunstenaarSwedish
Mona Lodström
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Mona Hermana Alexandra Lodström was born on 25 July 1918 in Limhamn, a coastal town just outside Malmö in southern Sweden. From the late 1930s she pursued a rigorous artistic education that took her through several of Stockholm's most serious ateliers: Otte Sköld's painting school from 1937 to 1939, Anders Beckman's advertising school from 1939 to 1940, and then Edvin Ollers' painting school in 1941. Sköld in particular - a painter who had studied under Matisse and who ran one of the city's most respected private schools - left a clear imprint on how Lodström understood color and pictorial structure.
A decade after completing her Stockholm training, she traveled to Paris for a formative year at the Académie Ranson in 1953-1954. The Ranson, founded at the close of the nineteenth century with deep ties to the Nabis group, was a school that encouraged freedom of expression and a sensory approach to painting rather than academic rigor. Study trips to Belgium, Italy, France, and Spain further broadened her visual reference points during these years. The time abroad deepened her commitment to non-figurative painting, the direction her work would consistently pursue.
Lodström's practice was genuinely multidisciplinary. In oil and gouache she worked with non-figurative motifs that she described as carrying a romantic meaning, abstract compositions where color relationships and spatial tension take precedence over recognizable imagery. Alongside this she made botanical illustrations in watercolor - careful, observational, technically demanding - and quilted patchwork blankets of considerable decorative sophistication. The textile work grew from her avocations in gardening and embroidery and shows how fluidly she moved between the fine arts and applied traditions.
She exhibited drawings at De ungas salong in Stockholm in 1942, then paintings at Lilla Paviljongen in 1955. That same year she showed jointly with John Thorgren at Lorensbergs konstsalong in Gothenburg. Her husband Georg Lodström (1915-1972) was also a painter - he studied at the Technical School in Stockholm and alongside her at the Académie Ranson in Paris - and the couple exhibited together at multiple venues in Sweden. Georg's work, represented at Stockholm City Museum and Västerås Art Museum, ran to cityscapes, landscapes, and still lifes, making their shared and separate exhibitions a complementary pairing of abstraction and representation.
Mona Lodström died on 9 March 2008 in Engelbrekt Parish in Stockholm, having lived and worked in the city for most of her adult life. At auction, her work appears almost exclusively at Bukowskis in Stockholm, where the platform records 25 paintings across their sales. All items are oils catalogued as paintings, with titles that give a clear picture of her abstract vocabulary: "Balans", "Illusion", "Composition", "Motsatt rörelse I", and numerous untitled works. The holdings from a November 2025 sale confirm continued interest from collectors focused on mid-century Swedish abstraction.