ArtistSwedish
Börne Augustsson
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Glass was never a chosen craft for Börne Augustsson - it was an inheritance. He began working at the Sandvik glassworks at the age of eleven, following his father into the furnace rooms of the Swedish glass tradition. That early immersion shaped everything that followed: a deep familiarity with molten material, a feel for how heat and breath interact in the shaping of a vessel, and an instinct for color that would come to define his most sought-after work.
Augustsson moved to Åseda Glasbruk during the late 1940s, at the moment the newly founded factory - registered as Åseda Glasbruks AB in 1947 - was beginning to assert its own identity within the Swedish Småland glass tradition. He was among the first designers to shape the house's aesthetic direction, contributing pieces that would establish the brukens reputation for daring color and modern sensibility applied through traditional handblown technique. His 1948 decanter series, produced for Åseda, is among the most documented works bearing his name and marks the period of his most direct design contribution.
At Åseda, Augustsson worked alongside later designer Bo Borgström to develop what became the factory's signature: vivid, often chromatic glass where modern form met the physical logic of the blowpipe. His pieces used the sommerso technique - casing one layer of glass inside another - to produce effects that shifted from deep jewel tones at the base to translucent pale gradients at the rim. Blues, ambers, rich oranges fading into clear crystal, and dense greens were characteristic of his palette. The forms themselves were organic rather than geometric: swelling shoulders, pulled lips, fluid asymmetry that revealed the maker's hand.
He returned to Sandvik and eventually replaced his father as glass master there in 1948, holding dual roles across the two traditions - the commercial craftsmanship of Sandvik and the more expressive ambition of Åseda - that positioned him as a practitioner rather than a theorist of mid-century Swedish glass.
Today Augustsson's pieces appear regularly at auction across Sweden. On the Auctionist platform, his work surfaces through 11 lots, catalogued primarily as glass and lighting, with items sold at regional houses including Formstad Auktioner, Ekenbergs, Laholms Auktionskammare, and Norrlands Auktionsverk. The top recorded result for a vas reached 300 EUR - modest by major design market standards, but consistent with the active collector interest in Åseda glass as an undervalued corner of the Scandinavian Modern canon. Pieces attributed to Augustsson continue to draw attention from collectors of Swedish mid-century decorative arts, particularly as interest in smaller Småland glassworks has grown alongside the established reputations of Kosta and Orrefors.