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Ultvedt, Per Olof (Jörgensen Hungerholt)
(b Kemi, 1927). Finnish sculptor, painter, printmaker and stage designer. In 1938 his family moved to Sweden, where in 1945 Ultvedt enrolled at the Konsthögskola in Stockholm; the following year he attended Sven Erixson’s decorative art school in Stockholm. In 1947 and 1948 he visited Paris, and in 1950 he had his first one-man show at the Galleri Noa-Noa in Copenhagen. At this time he was producing drawings, watercolours and engravings. In 1954 he designed the décor for the ballet Spiralen, performed at the Konserthus in Stockholm. From the mid-1950s he turned to collage, welded-metal sculptures and wood-and-paper assemblages, producing such works as Pig Trough (1958; see 1988 exh. cat., p. 16), a rectilinear object made from fragments of wood. In the early 1960s he made a number of shallow relief works using open layers of wood, as in Mobile (1961; Stockholm, Mod. Mus.). From the same period were a number of installations using wood, wire and other materials that were loosely assembled and often included moving parts, as in that for the Körelse i konsten (Movement in art) show at the Moderna Museum in Stockholm in 1961. In 1962 he collaborated with Robert Rauschenberg, Jean Tinguely, Niki de Saint Phalle and others on the large installation Dylaby at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam; for this a labyrinth of rooms was built, each filled with assemblages and other objects. Ultvedt also produced small-scale assemblages using moving parts and sometimes electric motors, as in ...Life (1961; Stockholm, Mod. Mus.). In 1966 he collaborated with Saint Phalle and Tinguely on the huge installation She: A Cathedral for an exhibition at the Moderna Museum in Stockholm. This consisted of a vast reclining woman 25 m long, between whose legs the spectator could walk to reach a series of interconnecting rooms with environmental assemblages, a bar and a cinema. After the exhibition the installation was destroyed. He continued to produce assemblages and sculptures, as well as installations that often had moving parts triggered by the movements of spectators. In 1972 he started drawing satirical cartoons that were later collected in Lag och ordning (1986). He travelled to France in 1973 and to Mexico in 1977. In the 1980s he designed a number of public sculptures, such as the Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1984) for the Folkets Park in Motala. These were simplified two-dimensional figurative designs cut into slabs of stone or concrete.
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