The making of Sweden’s Ståhl Collection: ‘something to dream about every day’

Mikael Ståhl had been collecting contemporary art for 30 years when, in 2012, he was invited by the Norrköping Art Museum to stage a temporary exhibition of his works. The Swedish businessman was honoured and flattered in equal measure to receive such an invitation from his home-town museum.

The public response to the show was positive, which got Ståhl thinking: why not create his own venue and exhibit his art there on a permanent basis?

‘By that stage, I had built up a nice-sized collection and was keen to open it up to other people,’ Ståhl says. ‘I’ve always been an advocate of lowering the threshold to art. That is, welcoming the everyday public into galleries and museums — which can sometimes seem like daunting environments.’

Ståhl’s next task was to find a space in which to show his collection. Fortunately, he owned a major Swedish real estate company, so he had a decent idea of where — and how — to source the right property. He hit upon Yllefabriken, a former textile factory by the Motala Ström river, in Norrköping’s old industrial heart. (In the 19th and early 20th century, the city had a thriving textile industry — so much so that it was nicknamed ‘the Manchester of Sweden’.)

‘I liked the rawness of the space and its industrial feel,’ says Ståhl. ‘I tried to maintain any chips in the pillars or little cracks in the walls. They create a nerve through the galleries — an edgy backdrop to the artworks on display.’

The transformation of the 1,900-square-metre space now known as the Ståhl Collection was all but complete by the start of 2020. With the advent of the coronavirus pandemic, however, it was decided to postpone the inauguration. ‘For several months, I was walking around as the only visitor,’ says Ståhl. ‘Which was fun at first, but the feeling was much better when we finally opened [in October 2020].’

Ståhl owns some 600 works in total, with 180 on display at any one time across the two floors of his museum. He carries out periodic rehangs, the most recent of which took place in September 2023. The mix always stays largely the same, however, with Swedish works in the basement galleries, and international works (German and American, above all) in the ground-floor spaces.

Cajsa von Zeipel, Linn Fernström and Truls Melin are among the artists who feature downstairs, with the likes of Georg Baselitz, Erwin Wurm and Robert Longo on the floor above. As part of this year’s rehang, one of Anselm Kiefer’s ‘Women of Antiquity’ sculptures also makes an appearance.

The Ståhl Collection spans the period from the late 1950s to the present day — complementing the Norrköping Art Museum, which specialises in Swedish modernist pieces from the first half of the 20th century.

What does Ståhl look for when acquiring a work? ‘I suppose I like art with big, universal themes,’ he says. ‘Hate, love, anxiety, sex, politics, and so on. It doesn’t matter where an artist is from, so long as they generate feelings.’

There’s certainly little Conceptualist or Minimalist art on show, and not too much in the way of abstraction either. This is eye-catching stuff, in which the human figure predominates — more often than not disturbed or distorted. Perhaps the overall sensibility might best be described as ‘Munchian’. Which is to say, in the spirit of Ståhl’s fellow Scandinavian Edvard Munch, the Norwegian painter who tackled ‘big, universal themes’ head-on.

The artist with the greatest number of works in the Ståhl Collection is Bjarne Melgaard, another Norwegian. No stranger to provocation, Melgaard habitually combines electric colour and a graffiti aesthetic to deal with topics such as substance abuse and sadomasochism. He is represented in the collection by pieces such as 2015’s Untitled, a painting (in the artist’s words) of ‘a Moomin on LSD’.

Ståhl was born in Norrköping in 1955. He says that his first encounters with art came on family holidays — wherever they went, his parents would take him and his two sisters to visit a museum. He still remembers the buzz, as a 15-year-old, of queuing up to see the Mona Lisa at the Louvre.

He read law at Lund University, with no intention then of entering the art world. He did, however, befriend a fellow student called Sten Eriksson, who went on to become an important gallerist in Stockholm. It was Eriksson who turned Ståhl on to art collecting and in 1982 sold him his first work, Pingvin 7: a quirky painting of a penguin with a blue cube attached to its belly, by the Swedish artist PG Thelander.

With Eriksson’s help, Ståhl amassed a significant collection of contemporary pieces from his homeland, with examples from all the major movements in Swedish art over the decades, from Neo-realism in the 1960s to Post-modernism in the 1980s.

In the early days of Ståhl’s collecting journey, Eriksson also recommended art books and exhibition catalogues for him to read. ‘I never had what you might call a formal art-historical education — but with Sten as my mentor, I really was privileged,’ Ståhl says. (Eriksson passed away in 1997.)

In time, Ståhl’s own artistic taste emerged more fully, and he says that since then the practice of collecting has, in a way, been quite straightforward. ‘I believe in following your eyes, not your ears,’ he says. ‘Go with your own personal reaction to a work rather than with an artist’s reputation. Do that, and you should be OK.’

As for his professional life, after graduation Ståhl worked with his father in the family real estate business, Henry Ståhl Fastigheter AB. Upon his father’s death in 1987, he took over the running of the company.

At the turn of the millennium, he started acquiring international artworks as well as Swedish ones. The vast majority of such acquisitions have taken place since the sale of Henry Ståhl Fastigheter AB to a Norwegian firm in 2014. ‘This meant I had the financial resources to expand the art collection in the way I wished,’ says Ståhl. ‘For an international piece, you often to have to add a zero to the end of the figure you pay for a Swedish one,’ he quips.

With the sale of the business, Ståhl could devote himself pretty much full-time to his collection — and the launch of the museum.

‘Part of my motivation came from wanting to invest in Norrköping,’ he says. ‘As the capital city, Stockholm sucks most of this country’s oxygen, not just politically and economically but also culturally. The Ståhl Collection has only been open for three years, so it’s still early days, but I do hope that it will help attract many new visitors to Norrköping.’

The city is the 10th largest in Sweden, having ranked second (behind Stockholm) at its peak, just over a century ago. Located two hours’ drive south-west of the capital, it has a population of 145,000. Following the demise of the textile industry in the early-to-mid-20th century, many mills were left abandoned — and Norrköping itself experienced a sharp decline.

It has taken decades, but the city is currently undergoing a renaissance, repurposing its derelict buildings and rebranding its old industrial core as a cultural and educational hotspot. The Ståhl Collection forms part of this, but perhaps the catalyst was the opening of a satellite campus of Linköping University in 1997. (Another popular attraction is the Louis De Geer Konsert & Kongress, a concert hall and conference venue housed in a former paper mill.)

It’s worth adding that the Ståhl Collection doesn’t occupy all of Yllefabriken: most of the complex is devoted to more than 100 new residential apartments. Slowly but very surely, Norrköping is making an asset of its post-industrial landscape.

As for Ståhl himself, he still collects, albeit at a slightly slower pace than before the museum opened. ‘I don’t want the collection to stay still,’ he says. ‘I keep an eye on the work being made today. In Sweden, a lot of it seems rooted in identity and immigration and the issue of what it means to be Swedish.’ He cites as an example Area Infected (2014), a painting by the Sámi artist Anders Sunna, which details the removal by county authorities of his family’s ancestral right to herd reindeer.

In a bid to support up-and-coming talent, Ståhl has launched an annual scholarship, granting a chosen artist 75,000 Swedish kronor (roughly $7,000). The Ståhl Collection also acquires a new work by each recipient, which is displayed at the museum for a set period of time.

The plan is for scholarships to be awarded every year until 2030, a sign that Ståhl is looking to the future. Now in his late sixties, does he ever think about retiring? ‘Absolutely not,’ he says. ‘The collection gives me something to think about, something to dream about, every day. I’m lucky to have it.’

The Ståhl Collection, Yllefabriken, Garvaregatan 4. 602 24 Norrköping, Sweden. stahlcollection.se.