DesignerSwedish
Eva Englund
4 active items
Eva Englund's Graal glass glows from within. Her figures, faces, and abstract forms appear suspended in the depths of the crystal, suffused with colour that seems to shift as the light changes. She pushed the Graal technique further than perhaps anyone since its inventors, using up to seven or eight shades of colour in a single piece and developing new methods of carving motifs that produced effects of light, shadow, and shading previously impossible in the medium.
Born in Stockholm in 1937, Englund trained at Konstfack in ceramics before a 1963 exhibition of Ingeborg Lundin's glass at Orrefors changed her direction entirely. The encounter with Lundin's ethereal work was so powerful that Englund abandoned ceramics for glass. In 1964 she joined Pukeberg Glasbruk as artistic contributor, succeeding Goran and Ann Warff. During nine years at Pukeberg she explored the full range of glass as a medium. In 1974 Orrefors headhunted her, and she received a permanent post at the glassworks where the Graal technique had been invented in 1916.
At Orrefors, Englund made the Graal technique her own. Where the original practitioners had used relatively simple colour schemes, she layered multiple shades of coloured glass to create figurative compositions of remarkable depth. Her distorted dark-coloured figures glowing in the glass's interior became her signature. Faces and erotic imagery were recurring themes, and some collectors focused exclusively on her face-decorated glasses. In collaboration with the copper-engraver Christina Lundh, she developed a new Graal method that used thin sheets of coloured glass rather than the traditional blasting and etching, producing finer gradations of light and shadow.
Her tableware also found a wide audience. The Maja series (1977) and Linnea series (1981) featured hand-painted floral and foliage designs that brought Englund's artistic sensibility to everyday drinking glasses. In 1988 she entered a phase of abstract work with richly coloured zigzag designs. She left Orrefors in 1990 to establish her own company, Muraya AB, continuing to produce Graal pieces independently.
At auction, Englund's glass appears across Swedish houses including RA Auktionsverket Norrkoping, Metropol, Formstad Auktioner, and Helsingborgs Auktionskammare. Her Graal pieces command the highest prices, with "Eldsjal" reaching 16,000 SEK and Graal Gallery bowls at 13,000 SEK. The 176 items on Auctionist are predominantly glass, with her unique Graal works attracting the strongest collector interest.