KunstenaarSwedish
Olle Svanlund
1 actieve items
Olle Hugo Svanlund was born on February 18, 1909, in Svängsta in Blekinge, on Sweden's southern coast. His path into art ran through commercial design rather than a traditional academy route. He went to Berlin in 1928 to study advertising drawing, then moved to Paris the following year, where he stayed until 1931. In Paris he worked at an advertising print shop and studied under Fernand Léger - an encounter that left a lasting mark on his approach to form, color, and the relationship between fine art and applied visual work.
After Paris he worked as an advertising designer in Stockholm, then returned to France for a period as a theater decorator before making a significant move: in 1935 he traveled to Brazil, where he spent time drawing environmental pictures and writing travel accounts that were published in Swedish newspapers. This combination of journalistic observation and artistic practice was characteristic of a generation of European artists who moved fluidly between professional image-making and fine art.
By the late 1930s and through the postwar decades, Svanlund had settled in Malmö, which remained his base until his death on January 5, 1996. The city became the primary site of his public work, and the range of that work is striking. He painted a large mural in a facility of the Öresund shipyard. At Mellanheden School in Malmö he completed a tempera painting titled Musik i luften (Music in the Air). He designed a facade in clinker and mosaic for a residential building belonging to Skånebyggen, and created a glass wall for the Gumælius advertising agency in Malmö. A choir window for Lammhults Church in Småland extended his reach into ecclesiastical decoration. He also produced enamel paintings on residential building facades in the Segevång district and at Djupdala School in Malmö. For Perstorp AB he made an abstract painting on a Perstorp board for an office building. Taken together, this body of public work places him among the more productively integrated artists of his generation in the Swedish south.
Alongside this applied and monumental work, Svanlund maintained an active studio practice in painting and printmaking, with abstraction as the dominant mode. His lithographs, several of which were signed and dated from the 1950s onward, show the influence of constructivist and post-Cubist abstraction - a lineage traceable directly to his years in Léger's orbit. He also taught at the Skånska målarskolan for a number of years, where he was part of the generation that helped consolidate a distinctly southern Swedish modernism.
Svanlund is represented in the collections of Moderna museet and Nationalmuseum in Stockholm - the latter holds his work Parisgata, a monotype transferred from the Swedish Institute in Paris in 1982 - as well as Malmö Museum, Institut Tessin in Paris, Gothenburg Museum, and Tomelilla's art collection in Skåne.
At auction, Svanlund's market is concentrated at Helsingborgs Auktionskammare, which accounts for the majority of his sales, with further activity at Garpenhus, Markus Auktioner, and Crafoord. His abstract compositions in lithograph are the works that appear most regularly. Recent results include a Komposition litografi at SEK 451 and a set of eleven compositions at SEK 425. The price level is modest but the auction presence is steady, sustained by collectors of mid-century Scandinavian graphic art.