Modern Art & Design presents Orrefors Lighting

Orrefors Lighting

For this autumn’s live auction Modern Art & Design, Bukowskis presents a curated selection of lighting from the Orrefors Glassworks, with designs ranging from 1920s classicism, via 1930s functionalism to the modernism of the following three decades.

The Orrefors Glassworks saw the light of day as early as 1898, but it was in the 1920s that it achieved world fame. The realization that only artists could renew the glass industry, the personalities and power struggles of the leading designers Simon Gate and Edward Hald, and a rapidly growing international industrialism were all important factors for this success. At the exhibitions in Gothenburg in 1923, Paris in 1925, New York and Chicago in 1927 and Stockholm in 1930, the glassworks from the deep woods of Småland stood out. Orrefors carefully followed the style shifts of the decades from Nordic classicism, through functionalism to modernism.

Already around 1919-20, Edward Hald designed some lamp shades with engraved decor. In the mid-1920s, a catalogue was released in a loose-leaf system with sketches by Gate and Hald, where chandeliers in Nordic classicist style were offered to "architects and other interested parties". The shades were cut and etched in different patterns and Gate had, in the spirit of the times, provided his fixtures with tassels and prisms. The lighting fixtures from Orrefors started to gain attention. "Saturnus" in yellow tinted frosted glass was launched in 1929, followed in the 1930s by a large range of ceiling lamps decorated with celestial patterns. Throughout his time as a glass designer, Edward Hald seems to have been particularly attached to the zodiac and other celestial motifs. Period-typical functionalist lamps consequently followed in the period after the Stockholm exhibition in 1930.

Edward Hald

Hald's monumental chandelier with model number "HD 55" in amber-tinted glass was designed around 1928. It is one of the department's foremost, and undoubtedly most imposing, examples of the Nordic classicism we today call Swedish Grace, which permeated the 1920s.

To the catalogue

Vicke Lindstrand

Glass artist Vicke Lindstrand came to Orrefors in 1928 and was associated with the glassworks for just over a decade. Over the years, he designed several fixtures, including the functionalistically emphasized "Arsenal", with a globe in amber-tinted glass and discs in clear glass with ring decoration. In several aspects a kind of further development of Hald's celestial motifs and "Saturnus" models developed around 1930.

To the catalogue

Ingeborg Lundin

Ingeborg Lundin was employed at the glassworks in 1947, and came to work with both utility and art glass. She was awarded the Lunning Prize in 1954 and a gold medal at the Milan Triennale in 1957, which gave her international notoriety. Fixtures by Lundin are rare, especially model "D 1907" from the 1960s in brass and molded glass.

To the catalogue