She arrived in Sweden as a refugee in 1944. At the time, she was in her thirties and already had an impressive résumé. In Tallinn, she had studied for four years at the State School of Arts and Crafts, followed by a scholarship that took her to the Finnish ceramics company Arabia, and then further studies in Munich and Tallinn before being employed at Gustavsberg in 1945. Four years later, she joined Upsala-Ekeby, where she remained until 1972.
At Auktionshuset Kolonn, we encounter six of her creations from her Uppsala years. All of them are female figures, each bearing the unmistakable Simmulson touch that made her so renowned in Sweden.
Mari Simmulson is a natural part of Sweden’s modern ceramic heritage, but she also belongs to the Baltic diaspora that, through the tragedies of the Second World War, came to enrich the Swedish art scene.
