ArtistSwedish
Åsa Jungnelius
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Glass has been Åsa Jungnelius's primary medium since she was seventeen years old, when she first learned to blow it at the Kosta Boda glassworks in Småland. That early physical encounter with molten material - the heat, the breath, the split-second decisions a glassblower must make - never left her practice. Born in 1975 in Fisksätra outside Stockholm, she grew up with no formal connection to the art world, yet with an acute sensitivity to space and material that would become the engine of everything she later made.
She trained formally at Konstfack, the University of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm, completing her MFA in ceramics and glass in 2004. Her graduation exhibition, "I Like Your Hair Style!", arrived with the force of an argument. The installation used glass to interrogate beauty ideals and the gendered pressures built into everyday aesthetics - lipsticks, nail polish, the loaded language of cosmetic femininity - reinterpreted through a material historically associated with Scandinavian craft tradition. The work announced both a voice and a method: taking the decorative seriously, turning seduction into critique.
Since 2007 Jungnelius has worked as a permanent artist with Kosta Boda, where she operates with an unusual latitude - treating the collaboration as a platform to reach audiences beyond the gallery system rather than a departure from art. The "Make Up" series, launched in 2008, translated her graduation themes into functional glass objects: lips, stilettos, nail-polish flacons, all rendered in mouth-blown glass with the same unsettling glamour she brought to the exhibition hall. The Crackle series explored different ground - vases formed by submerging hot glass in ice water, creating organic fractures that scatter light unpredictably. The technique is ancient in concept but deliberately out of control in practice, and it captures something central to how Jungnelius works: precision coexisting with the willingness to let material decide.
From 2013 she has maintained her own studio in Månsamåla, deep in Glasriket (the Glass Kingdom) in Småland - a region whose glassblowing heritage she engages with consciously, neither romanticizing it nor ignoring the weight it carries. She served as Associate Professor at Konstfack between 2012 and 2022, and in 2022 received an honorary doctorate from Linnaeus University in Växjö, whose Faculty of Arts and Humanities specifically cited her contributions to Swedish glass art and art education.
Her large-scale public commissions extend the same concerns into civic space. "Transit of Venus" (2023) is a two-part sculptural monument beside Observatorielunden in Stockholm, donated to the city as a relational tribute to International Women's Day. More ambitiously, she has been working since 2015 on "Snäckan" (The Seashell) for Stockholm's new Hagastaden metro station - a complete architectural transformation of the station interior into a shell-like crystal environment, with an enormous marble and aluminum pearl at its center. The work is expected to complete in 2027. In 2025, the Pera Museum in Istanbul presented her first solo exhibition in Turkey, "A Verse, Written with Earth, Fire, Water, and Air," which brought together glass and marble sculptures alongside new works made in collaboration with glassworkers in Denizli and material drawn from obsidian fields in eastern Anatolia.
On Auctionet and the Swedish secondary market, Jungnelius's work appears almost exclusively under the Glass category, which accounts for 35 of her 39 indexed lots. Her pieces circulate through houses including Kaplans Auktioner, Auktionshuset Kolonn, Helsingborgs Auktionskammare, and Gomér & Andersson Nyköping. Top recorded sales include the "Jackie rosa" vase for Kosta Boda at 2,402 EUR and limited-edition glass sculptures from her art series. The market reflects the dual nature of her practice: collectors access both the high-edition Kosta Boda objects and the more limited sculptural works, with prices ranging accordingly.