Bertil Vallien

Bertil Vallien - A Renewer of Swedish Glass
Bertil Vallien has become known over much of the world for his sand moulds. His metre-long ships and mysterious heads of glass are well known to collectors, and Bertil Vallien is represented at the foremost art museums in the USA, Europe and Japan. Art is a kind of research, says Bertil Vallien. In the studio and the blowing room an endless discussion goes on between the many faithful and skilled artisans who have been involved for almost forty years in Bertil’s astonishing expedition in glass. Born in 1938. Designer at Kosta Boda since 1963 with a studio at the Åfors glassworks.

Encapsulation and the search for freedom The circle of motifs of Sweden’s best-known artist Bertil Vallien - one of the truly groundbreaking figures of Swedish glass art - was born the second of seven children in Stockholm in 1938. His father was a master painter and pastor of a non-conformist church, his mother a homemaker. An exceptionally gifted young man, he soon grew tired of school and instead took a job as an interior decorator at PUB, one of Stockholm’s largest department stores, and shortly thereafter began studying art at Konstfack, the School of Arts, Crafts and Design. He graduated top of his class in 1961 and was awarded a Royal Foundation scholarship.

The grant enabled him to travel extensively in the U.S.A. and Mexico between 1961 and 1963 and to achieve his first success, as a ceramics artist, in California. On his return to Sweden - now married to his wife Ulrica, a fellow graduate of the School of Arts, Crafts and Design - Bertil Vallien moved to the glassmaking region of Småland, recruited by no less a figure than the legendary glasshouse director Erik Rosén. Vallien immediately began to work in glass and wrought iron, and soon began to experiment with glasscasting.

And indeed, Bertil Vallien is best known internationally as a past master of sandcasting. His great glass ships, some of them several metres long, are prized collectors’ pieces, and his work is represented in major museums in the U.S.A., Europe and Japan.

The idea of cast ship forms and the symbolic idiom he employs came to him in the late eighties. The ship is a perfect vessel for expression of loneliness; it is evocative of femininity, of adventure, of catastrophe, a thin protective shell that demands the absolute respect of all aboard. It is a society in isolation, a self-contained world afloat on the sea.

"I’ve been lucky in life," says Vallien. He spends much of his time thinking, much of it sketching; rigorously self-critical, he discards most of what he produces. He considers his art a form of research. In the studio and on the blowing room floor, there is an ongoing dialogue between Vallien and the many skilled and loyal artisans who have shared in his almost forty-year voyage of discovery through the world of glass.

Under Bertil Vallien’s watchful eye, tiny Åfors glassworks, founded in 1876, has become something of a national centre for the arts. Its premises, grown shabby from years of unrelenting activity, were thoroughly renovated during the mid-nineties. But the same dry heat from the furnaces still greets visitors who take the short steps from the main street of the picturesque village into the blowing room.

The level of technical development and finely tuned control over the sandcasting technique that Vallien and his artisans have achieved inspire total respect. They have cast ships up to four metres long creations that take weeks to cool and must be shipped by heavy trucks.

Bertil Vallien’s tableware, too, is characterised by a technical brilliance few can equal. His work as an industrial designer has been a fertile imaginative counterpoint to his purely artistic creation and has won him many honours, especially during the eighties and nineties. The most recent came in 1995, when he was the first recipient of the Urban Glass Award, honoured for his outstanding achievements in glass art.

Among his most popular works can be counted tableware such as the Château series (1981), the best-selling handmade series of all time, with, to date, over 12 million glasses sold worldwide. Other modern classics include Satellite (1992), Domino (1993), Viewpoints (1995), Tower (1995), Chicko (1996) and Brains (1998).

As early as 1981, Vallien was acknowledged as the world’s most influential designer in his field by Japan Interior Design Magazine. His CV lists some fifteen other important awards. Every year he is invited to serve as a visiting lecturer at universities both in Sweden and abroad.

Among the works he showed at AREA II, a major exhibition staged at the Heller Gallery in New York in 1993, were Watchers and Maps, depicting imaginary archaeological finds made by a society from the distant future. One of the pieces, a sand-cast map, was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1996, Bertil Vallien was asked to participate in a show at the Doges’ Palace in Venice along with such international glass luminaries as Dale Chihuly of the U.S.A. In 1997, he was invited to another major survey exhibition at the American Crafts Museum in New York.

The artistic theme of Heads originated in a newspaper article about a young woman in 1870s’ Småland who fell unconscious in an accident and remained so throughout much of her adult life, awakening only in her forties. Dreamlike, ominous and mysterious, the heads stand on pillars of Öland stone. Or rest on the floor, inviting us to peer into a hidden world. Glass is an artistic medium that allows us to see deep into the interior, and Bertil Vallien uses the extra dimension to relate to this real-life tale. So strongly did this fascinating story capture Vallien’s imagination that over recent years he has produced an enormous variety of heads in diverse formats.

In 1998, Vallien had his first Stockholm exhibition. The show, called Archaeological Archetypes, was one of the high points of the city’s year as European Cultural Capital, a fitting tribute to one of the country’s true artistic leaders. Many of the designs and ideas spur associations to early Mediterranean cultures, though early Iron-Age masks and figures on medieval baptismal fonts were also sources of inspiration. The show included boats, watchmen, maps and heads and was ceremonially inaugurated by Princess Christina.

In 2001 Bertil Vallien became the first Swede to receive the highly prestigious VISIONARIES! Award, which is given out each year by the American Craft Museum to honour and promote the leading artistic visionaries and passionate spokespeople in the artistic sphere.