ArtistSwedish
Åsa Brandt
4 active items
When Åsa Brandt built a small glass furnace in the town of Torshälla in spring 1968, she did something that had not been done before in Europe: she created an independent artist-operated glass studio, free from the industrial glassworks that had until then been the only route into the medium. That act positioned her at the origin point of the European studio glass movement, and the studio she established became a reference for a generation of glass artists who followed.
Born in 1940, Brandt trained at Konstfack in Stockholm from 1962 to 1967, with exchange study at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam in 1966 and the Royal College of Art in London in 1967. Her teacher at the Rietveld was Sybren Valkema, one of the key figures transmitting the new studio glass ideas coming out of North America to Europe. Brandt absorbed this thinking and carried it back to Sweden, where the idea of a single artist blowing and forming glass outside an industrial context was still entirely novel.
During the 1970s, her work moved between intricate sculptural forms and functional objects - mouth-blown drinking glasses and goblets with strong shapes and colours that were far from the decorative-industrial mainstream. The functional and the free artistic existed alongside each other in her practice, never as opposing categories. From 1984, she added a further dimension by working with reclaimed window glass, which she painted with traditional glass pigments and used as a ground for sandblasted photographic images.
Her public commissions brought the work into daily life at a civic scale: glass installations at Mälarsjukhuset and Sankt Andreas Church in Eskilstuna, at Arlanda Airport, and at the Kitayama Children Daycare Center in Tokyo. The Swedish royal couple visited her Torshälla workshop during their tour of Sörmland in 1980. Her work entered major institutional collections including Nationalmuseum, Röhsska Museum, Örebro Läns Museum, the Swedish Glass Museum, the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, and the Corning Museum of Glass in New York State.
On the auction market, Brandt's glass appears with some regularity at Swedish regional houses, particularly Södermanlands Auktionsverk and Gomér and Andersson in Nyköping - fitting geography given her deep roots in Sörmland. Auctionist currently tracks 18 lots, with 4 active at the time of writing. Items catalogued include goblets, vases, bowls, and small sculptures signed simply "Åsa," typically dating from the second half of the 20th century. Prices at auction have been modest, generally in the 300-600 SEK range, reflecting the market reality for studio glass by figures better known within craft history than the broader contemporary art market.