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Elof Wedin (1901-1983) was a Swedish-American artist who enjoyed a 50-year career in Minneapolis and St. Paul, MN. His main choice of medium was oil on canvas, but he also worked with pastels on velour, carved wood, and stainless steel.

Art

Wedin’s works are represented in many major private and institutional collections, including the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the American Swedish Institute in Minneapolis, the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

In 1996 Wedin was one of 33 artists whose work was featured in the exhibition “Pictures for a New Home: Minnesota’s Swedish-American Artists,” at the James J. Hill House Gallery in St. Paul, sponsored by the Minnesota Historical Society.

In 2008, Elof Wedin was one of the artists featured in the Weisman Art Muesum’s “By the People, for the People” exhibit of Works Progress Administration paintings.

Elof Wedin’s art naturally spanned three phases – early, middle and late – each marked by a distinctive style. His early works, from the 1920s to the mid-1930s, are representational. His major influences during this period were Rembrandt, Modigliani, and the Impressionists. Wedin did many portraits, which he enjoyed. Wedin once said “Merely pretty people don’t make the best pictures. They’ve got to be interesting”. He liked women best, and his wife often sat for him. “I never get tired of painting her; she’s never the same person twice”. During the 1930s, his portraits became more modernist in style, with oval faces and elongated features reminiscent of the Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani.

Wedin was also a landscape painter, an interest that was stirred in 1933 and was the subject of his entry in the 1934 Minnesota State Fair. During the depression, Wedin painted for several New Deal art projects, producing a series of Minneapolis street scenes under the Public Works of Art program, as well as works for the post offices of Litchfield, MN and Mobridge, SD. He was also a Works Progress Administration artist, focusing on regionalism depicting scenes from small towns and from the North Shore of Minnesota, where he spent time. Unlike many regionalists, his style was a highly abstract geometric.

Works from Wedin’s middle period, 1935 to 1957, were striking for their experimentation with textures, free form and pastel colors. They are distinctly modernist, but not yet completely abstract. His landscapes of the 30s and 40s had flattened space with no perspective, minimal sky, and buildings represented as angular shapes. Major influences during this time included Cezanne, Picasso, Braque, and Cubism.

In his final phase, 1958 through the mid-1970s, Wedin used raw colors applied with a palette-knife technique. By the 1960s he had begun to paint large non-objective canvases in thickly applied diagonals of bold color and black. Brilliantly colored areas that appeared to be broken up at close range would fit together at a distance, producing what Wedin called a “hidden abstract” composition.

Art Education and Career

Elof Wedin entered night school at the Minneapolis Institute of Art in the early 1920s. In 1926, he went to study under George Oberteuffer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Two years later, he returned to Minneapolis. While Wedin worked a day job doing duct work and pipe coverings for boilers, he painted on nights and weekends.

During his art career, Elof Wedin received numerous awards, including awards from the Minneapolis Institute of Arts annual shows, Minnesota State Fair exhibitions, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Swedish-American Clubs of Minneapolis and Chicago, the Women’s Club of Minneapolis, the First New York American Artist Exhibition, the San Francisco Exhibition and the Los Angeles County Exhibition.

Family and Employment

Elof Wedin was born June 28th, 1901, in Härnösand, Ångermanland Sweden. His father was a shopkeeper. Elof learned his trade of insulating and lining boilers while living in Sweden. He immigrated to the United States in 1919, taking up residence in Minneapolis, MN. Elof Wedin wed Lilian Westman in October of 1926. In 1928, Wedin began his career as a pipe coverer, insulating boilers and ductwork with asbestos. Their first son, Winslow, was born in 1933, and their second son, Gary, was born in 1942.

Winslow Wedin is a full-time architect who has also worked in graphic design, product design, painting, sculpture, jewelry, ceramics, and interior accessories. He has been described as “a practicing architect, urbanist, artist and futurist”. Winslow taught architecture at Auburn University, in Florida, and in Saudia Arabia. He designed a flowing, organic polyurethane foam house known as Ensculptic that was built in Minnetrista, MN and was featured in Life Magazine in 1970.

Gary Wedin adopted his father’s occupation as a commercial insulator of pipes, boilers, ducts, chillers, and other components of mechanical systems, and worked for forty years in the trade. He is also an artist in his own right; his "Concerto" was featured on a 2008 cover of the U.S. Department of Veterans' Affairs "Journal of Rehabilitation Research and Development". In 2008, the Water and Oil Gallery in St Paul, MN hosted a father/son show of Elof and Gary Wedin's works.

Elof Wedin died February 1, 1983 from complications due to prolonged asbestos exposure.