The information about Gunhild Pfeiffer on the internet is scarce, besides articles about her living situation of which I will speak below.1
According to Pfeiffer herself, she was born in 1948 in Umeå and grew up near Helsingborg. Creativity, she states, was part of her life as a child, and in her late school years, she was into croquet, ceramics, and weaving. She studied Industrial Design (Textile Design) at HFBK for two semesters in 1968 and returned in 1974/1975 as a guest student with Margret Hildebrand, professor for textile design (1956-1981). Pfeiffer said that she discovered painting in 1988 only, after a trip to the Faroe Islands. 2
One explanation for why there is so little information about her on the internet is due to the fact that she is almost completely living without electricity. In 1997, Pfeiffer moved to an area outside Åseda in Småland and into a house from the 1800s, with one room dedicated to exhibiting her art.3 her house doesn’t have running water, light is coming from petrol lights or candles, and her food is kept cold in the basement. Still, she is not completely without electricity, since she has solar panels to charge her phone on her roof. She says that the way she is living is also giving her economic freedom to make public art and writing.4 Because of her special lifestyle in Sweden, she had several school classes on studio visits.5
In 2007, Gunhild Pfeiffer had an exhibition in the gallery Garvaregården in Långasjö, a small village in the South of Sweden. The works she showed were inspired by her childhood, by family letters and children’s drawings from her brothers. These were also the behind the series Umeå 1949, lively, predominantly red paintings with children’s scribblings on them.6
