ArtistSwedish
Edvin Öhrström
3 active items
Karl Edvin Ohrstrom was born on 22 August 1906 in Burlov and grew up in Halmstad, the son of a railroad worker. He came to art through training as a drawing teacher at Tekniska skolan in Stockholm between 1925 and 1928, before enrolling in the sculpture programme at the Royal University College of Fine Arts, where he studied under Carl Milles and Nils Sjogren from 1928 to 1931. In 1930 he received the school's Chancellor's Medal, followed by a royal medal and a travel scholarship in 1932 that took him through the Netherlands, France, Italy, Germany and Belgium.
The encounter with Orrefors Glasbruk from 1936 onwards changed the direction of his work. Together with fellow artist Vicke Lindstrand and master glassblower Gustaf Bergkvist, Ohrstrom developed what became known as the Ariel technique. The method involves carving a deep pattern into a glass blank, then encasing the carved piece in a layer of clear glass, trapping pockets of air that form precise, suspended lines of bubbles within the finished vessel. The name came from Shakespeare's spirit of the air, and the effect, crisp geometric or figurative forms floating inside optically clear glass, was unlike anything the medium had produced. The first Ariel works were shown at the Paris World Exhibition in 1937. Ohrstrom continued visiting the glassworks for two months each year until 1957.
Alongside his work in glass, Ohrstrom maintained a sustained practice as a monumental sculptor. He received the Grand Prix at the Milan Triennale in 1955.
The commission that defined his legacy came in 1962, when Ohrstrom won the competition for the central monument at Stockholm's newly planned Sergels torg. His proposal, a 37.5-metre obelisk assembled from 60,000 glass prisms in pink, soda green, blue and clear glass on a steel armature, was titled Kristall, vertikal accent i glas och stal. The obelisk was finally installed in 1974, and the work stands as one of the most ambitious uses of glass in post-war European public art.
On the Swedish auction market, Ohrstrom's Ariel works from Orrefors account for the overwhelming majority of his recorded sales. The highest documented result is 42,000 SEK for an Ariel sculpture at Bukowskis. Vases in the Ariel series have sold in the range of 11,000-20,000 SEK. Uppsala Auktionskammare also represents a significant share of the market. The 100 recorded lots are spread across glass (69), sculptures (22) and smaller decorative categories.