BERTIL VALLIEN is a gift to glass. The impressive portfolio of this prolific artist is haunting, memorable, and mesmerizing.
His 60-year career, spent advancing the craft of sand-casting, is a study of one man's existential questioning actualized on hypnotic works of art.
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BERTIL VALLIEN IS A 60-YEAR KOSTA BODA ICON, DESIGNING FOR THE BRAND SINCE 1963.
He is one of Sweden's most celebrated glass artists with numerous awards and museums exhibitions around the globe. Vallien is known for creating mythical, dream-like worlds of symbolic imagery, what he calls "a never-ending research quest." Once Vallien pioneered a sand casting technique he knew he found his raison d'être. The perpetual student and master has been on a lifelong quest to understand glass, with awe-inspiring and prodigious results. "Glass offers opportunities like no other material," he says. "For me, the blowing room is the center of everything. It's like ladling matter out of a volcano and watching the glowing lava turn to ice. Knowing the exact moment at which to capture a shift of light or expression and wrench the secret from the glass is what it's all about." The sand casting process (essentially a design is carved into treated serpentine sand to create a mold into which molten hot glass is poured leaving a perfect solidified casting) was the quintessential technique for the tactile Vallien. "I'm a builder and I enjoy using my hands throughout the process. Once I had found my form of expression, I felt that sand cast glass was what I wanted to focus on completely. A whole new world opened up. Ideas advanced and led to new discoveries. Over the years, I have taught the technique that I developed quite freely all over the world. Glass is my novel to which I have devoted myself, and my drawings are like poetry on the side."
................................ In 1998, Vallien created the first Brains, the blue Karolina, far right. The head has become one of the artist's most prominent symbols. Vallien views them as meditative anti-stress objects for both the hand and the eye. Karolina was inspired by the story of Karolina Olsson, who reportedly suffered a head injury after falling on ice and remained in a coma for 32 years. When she awakened she said her memories included blue men.
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The now 85-year-old Vallien has been searching for artistic expression his whole life. He grew up in a suburb of Stockholm alongside six siblings in a devoutly religious home. "I rejected the things I was taught as a child," he says. "A mass of prohibitions and restraints that limited my view of the world and my freedom. I refused to accept it and longed to get away." Vallien left home at just 15. "I had a great need to assert myself. It wasn't until I began at Konstfack (National College of Arts, Crafts and Design) that I got some feedback and was able to match my abilities against my fellow students." He then spent two years at the School for Advanced Industrial Design, graduated at the top of his class, was awarded a Royal Foundation grant, and received various job offers. His love of ceramics brought him to L.A. where he studied art at USC and worked at a ceramics factory. "The years I spent in the U.S. have meant a lot to me," says Vallien. "The U.S. was a real injection and a terrific boost to my confidence."
Vallien returned to Sweden in 1963 when an invite from the C.H. Åfors glass factory beckoned. "I remember that time as a blend of hopeful anticipation, joy, and fear," he says. "The fear of not being good enough, of not being able to make a living out of the lengthy training I'd had. But mostly tremendous optimism." Vallien liked glass for the artistic opportunities it offered that ceramics didn't. It was at the glassworks where Vallien and his wife, fellow celebrated Kosta Boda designer Ulrica Hydman, gained notice and acclaim. "From the very first moment, I was captivated by the seductive properties of glass," he says. "I have dedicated my entire life as an artist to exploring and pushing the limits of this material. It's as though I had two occupations: one as a designer of good, functional utility objects where I have to take the limitations of mass production into
account; the other as an artist where I have complete control and the freedom to work with my own ideas."
................................ Red Rim is one of Vallien's more mainstream designs. "Back to the classics" is the idea behind the collection. Of course, Vallien couldn't resist creating one version with a face as stem.
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The glassmaking couple were inseparable through their college and work years. Says Vallien of Hydman, who died in 2018: "We have always been each other's fiercest critic. We live in a constant state of creative tension. We fire and mutually stimulate each other's work." The couple were indispensable to the fortunes of the glassworks (Vallien, in fact, created valuable new technologies and techniques) and remained there until 1990 when it became part of Orrefors Kosta Boda. Emon Maasho is North America's CEO/president. "For 60 years, Bertil Vallien has designed both popular glassware collections and incredible art glass for Kosta Boda," he says. "In 1980, he turned to sand casting where he earned an international reputation as the father of a lost technique that he perfected with his large boats, heads, and sculptures. Bertil's work is represented in some of the world's most renowned museums, including the Corning Museum of Glass in New York and the Tokyo Art Museum in Japan. He has made a lasting impression on the Kosta Boda legacy and on Swedish glass art and design in general."
Vallien's portfolio for Kosta Boda is haunting, symbolic, and mystical, his sculptures at least. His drinkware (which is minimal) is fresh, utilitarian, and classic. It's not surprising that he is known as "a storyteller in glass." Vallien is interested in creating pieces that invite the holder to use and discuss, always with an inordinate sense of craftsmanship. Vallien has been labeled a symbolist, with clear themes appearing regularly in his art as metaphors for the human condition. In addition to boats (an obvious signature), the head, house, ladder, and stairs are other familiar elements of the stories he tells through his art. "They are easily understandable symbols that represent the existential world," he says. "They welcome poetic interpretations from the viewer." It's almost as if the artist is taking us on a mystical journey through his subconscious, revealing existential secrets through a series of DaVinci-like symbols and codes embedded in glass. Vallien is inspired by sketching; his drawings create their own worlds of creativity where ideas breed ideas. He also finds inspiration in the glass itself, how it becomes a transparent container, displaying the contents and allowing it to become a part of the material, almost in a search of an illusive inner light. "Glass eats light," he enthuses. Vallien's catalog represents search. His artistry seems to elicit far more questions than answers, but enriches through its craft and skill and innovativeness. While Vallien still designs for Kosta Boda Artist's Collection he no longer adds to the more mainstream collections. "Kosta Boda can't mention enough how much Bertil means to the brand as an artist and a person," affirms Maasho. "We're thrilled to celebrate his artistry and all he has achieved this fall with spectacular exhibitions in New York, Corning, and Stockholm," says Maasho.
Vallien's oeuvre throughout the latter chapters of his life has us practically euphoric about possibilities that still lie ahead. The enigmatic searcher is reported to have said, "An artist does not retire" which, happily, suggests further art awaits.
................................ Vallien is known for his boat sculptures, including the almost ten-foot piece shown here, valued at $1 million. With this project, Vallien is portraying the mythology of the history of the world, from birth to death. (Vallien first started working with boats to honor his toddler son Mattias who drowned.) "The boat is a wonderful shape used in many cultures and used to reach unknown worlds," he says. "The solitude of the boat is total and its very thin skin is the only thing that protects you from danger. This ship gives me possibilities and it's loaded with fragments of history." The vessel was presented at SOFA Chicago in 2016 and is now a fixture at The Flint Institute of Arts outside of Detroit.
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