ArtistSwedish
Birgitta Watz
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Astrid Birgitta Watz (born Wåréus) was born on 19 March 1937 in Uppsala, Sweden. She trained at HDK, the Konstindustriskolan in Gothenburg, where she acquired the technical and aesthetic foundation that would allow her to move across disciplines with equal fluency. Over a career spanning more than six decades, she has worked in ceramics, glass, textiles, painting, sculpture, and writing, maintaining throughout a visual sensibility in which colour, light, and a kind of generous materiality are the connecting threads.
In the mid-1960s, Watz established Watz Design Sweden AB in Stockholm, positioning herself early as both a maker and a design entrepreneur. In 1967 she received a commission from Upsala Ekeby, one of Sweden's foremost ceramics manufacturers, to design bowls - an early recognition of her formal talent. She also developed a relationship with Lindshammar Glasbruk, the Swedish glassworks, producing handmade art glass that has since become sought after by collectors. Her most commercially visible work came in the 1980s, when she designed the Quattro, Nero, Bianco, and Rosso tableware services for Rörstrand, one of Scandinavia's oldest porcelain factories. These services - clean, modern, and with a strong graphic identity - brought her work into a much wider domestic market.
Parallel to her studio and industrial design practice, Watz built a significant career in art education. She served as head of the Department of Graphic Design and Illustration at Konstfack, the University of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm, and later held a professorship focused on meal knowledge with an orientation toward art and design at Restauranghögskolan in Grythyttan, a connection she has maintained since the mid-1990s. Her public commissions include concrete talismanic stones in Brunnsparken in Gothenburg, a ceramic mural painting at Lindholmen's educational centre, porcelain reeds at the regional hospital in Skövde, and an apple sculpture at Karolinska Hospital in Stockholm.
The range of institutions holding Watz's work is unusually broad for a Swedish applied artist. Her pieces are in the permanent collection at Le Grand Louvre in Paris and at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York, and her ceramics have been used in the rooms of the Boutique Hotel Ett Hem in Stockholm. She participated in the Steninge Slott World Exhibition of Art Glass, where her pieces in handmade glass from around 2001 were included alongside work from other prominent Scandinavian glass artists. In recent years, a collaboration with the Swedish fashion brand House of Dagmar resulted in a trio of scented candles hand-poured into Watz-made stoneware mugs - a project that introduced her work to a new generation of design-conscious consumers.
On Auctionist, Watz's 12 lots span glass, ceramics, and prints. Her top sale is a 29-piece glazed ceramic service realised at 4,200 SEK through Crafoord Auktioner Stockholm, which also accounts for three of her five top auction houses alongside Metropol, Kalmar Auktionsverk, and Gomér and Andersson Linköping. Other lots include art glass from Steninge Slott (2001) and signed, numbered colour lithographs. The range of materials in her auction record reflects the breadth of her practice across five decades.