Benny Motzfeldt

Her encounter with glass came late and almost by accident. In 1955 she was hired as a draughtsperson at Christiania Glasmagasin, tasked with designing sandblasted and engraved decorations for Hadeland Glassverk. Within a few years she had moved onto the factory floor itself, working directly beside the glass blowers. That proximity transformed her practice. Rather than designing on paper for others to execute, she began shaping form and surface in real time, exploiting the material's resistance and unpredictability. The small glass sculptures she called Isfugler (Kingfishers, c. 1960) emerged from this period and marked her true debut as a glass artist.

At Hadeland from 1955 to 1967, Motzfeldt developed the vocabulary that would define her for the rest of her career: molten glass seeded with air bubbles and metallic inclusions, threads of copper or steel that caught the light from inside the body of a vessel, combined with dense, often dark colour fields. The surfaces were seldom smooth; she favoured the lumpen, the encrusted, the visually restless. She moved to Randsfjord Glassverk as artistic director in 1967, then in 1970 accepted the position of artistic director at Glasshytta, the small glassworks run by the craft cooperative PLUS in Fredrikstad's Old Town, where she would remain until her death in 1995.

It was at PLUS that her work reached its fullest expression. The cooperative's ethos, close collaboration between artist and craftsperson, tolerance for experimentation, rejection of industrial-scale repetition, suited her perfectly. She pushed further into sculptural territory, creating pieces that functioned as much as objects to be read as vessels to be used. In parallel she continued to exhibit as a painter and collagist, often combining straw, leaves, textiles, metal foil, and netting with watercolour, and from the 1970s onward she began showing paintings alongside glass in the same exhibitions.

International recognition came gradually and then decisively. A joint exhibition with textile artist Synnøve Anker Aurdal at Röhska Museet in Gothenburg in 1970 was the turning point. A major touring exhibition travelled through the United States and Europe between 1976 and 1982, introducing her work to audiences beyond Scandinavia. Her glass entered the permanent collections of the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Kunstindustrimuseet in Copenhagen, the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, and the Frauenau Glass Museum in Germany. A significant group of works was later placed in a permanent room at Nordenfjeldske Kunstindustrimuseum in Trondheim, as part of the exhibition "Tre kvinner, tre kunstnere" alongside Hannah Ryggen and Synnøve Anker Aurdal. She was awarded the Souvenir Prize in 1964, the Jacob Prize in 1969, the Prince Eugen Medal in 1985, and was decorated Knight First Class of the Order of St. Olav, also in 1985. She died on 24 November 1995.

At Nordic auction houses her glass appears most often at Grev Wedels Plass Auksjoner in Oslo, which accounts for the bulk of the approximately 82 auction records traced on this platform. Prices for individual pieces have ranged from a few hundred to around 7,000 NOK for titled compositions from the late 1980s, with broader international platforms reporting records up to roughly 2,075 USD as recently as 2025. Demand is steady among collectors of Scandinavian studio glass, and her work is increasingly sought after as interest in mid-century Nordic craft continues to grow.