Eero Aarnio

The first Eero Aarnio retrospective, held at Helsinki Art Hall in 2003, was followed by a world tour 2003-2007 to Oslo (Kunstindustrimuseet, 2004), Copenhagen (Dansk Design Center, 2005), Washington D.C. (The Finnish Embassy, 2005), México City (Museo Franz Mayer, 2007) and Berlin (The Finnish Embassy, 2007).

The legendary Finnish designer, Professor Eero Aarnio was one of the first to create furniture in fiberglass and plastic; materials that offer virtually unlimited possibilities to create new
shapes and colours. With his “Ball Chair”, presented at the international furniture fair in Cologne in 1966, Aarnio revolutionized furniture design and the innovative easy chair marked his final career breakthrough internationally. Eero Aarnio’s design is sculptural but at the same time playful, with frequent allusions to 1960’s pop culture. Aarnio’s designs were based on fundamental geometrical elements such as the sphere and the ellipse, and he transformed these into seat furniture. Aarnio’s creed was that “a chair is a seat but a seat doesn’t have to look like a chair”. The pieces quickly became hugely popular with a broad international demand and today Eero Aarnio is considered one of the greatest contemporary designers worldwide. With their futuristic shapes and materials Aarnio’s creations became symbols of the Space Age - a notion the designer himself has always shunned. “Space didn’t inspire me at all, I just wanted to create a round chair, I simply wanted to find a new shape”, Aarnio has stated in numerous interviews. During his career Eero Aarnio has been awarded numerous prizes, amongst them the International Design Award
of the American Institute of Interior Designers in 1968, the Italian Compasso d’Oro prize in 2008, the Kaj Franck Design Prize in 2008 and the Pro Finlandia Award in 2010.