DesignerSwedish
Gunnel Sahlin
4 active items
A lemon in glass, so saturated with yellow it seems to glow from within. A vase in ruby red that shifts to amber at its lip. An "Aqua Botanica" sculpture where plant forms float in translucent blue. Gunnel Sahlin's glass has an intensity of colour that feels almost edible, a quality that makes sense once you learn she came to glass not through traditional craft training but through textiles and fashion.
Gunnel Sahlin was born in 1954 in Umeå, in northern Sweden. She moved to Stockholm in 1975 and studied textiles at Konstfack (the University College of Arts, Crafts and Design) from 1979 to 1983. After graduating, she went to New York, where she worked for the fashion designer Katja of Sweden, developing her exceptional eye for colour and pattern in the charged atmosphere of 1980s Manhattan fashion.
In 1986, Kosta Boda hired her, and the textile designer's transition to glass proved electric. Sahlin brought a chromatic boldness and a sense of playfulness that renewed the venerable glassworks' creative energy. Her background in textiles, in draping, layering, working with surfaces that catch and hold colour, translated into glass pieces that felt different from the sober Scandinavian tradition. Her Frutteria series, glass fruits rendered with such vivid realism that a bowl of them could pass for a still life painting, became a particular sales phenomenon.
For nearly twenty years, from 1986 to 2005, Sahlin shaped Kosta Boda's identity in both art glass and utility glass. Her series, Rumba, Aqua Botanica, Atoll, Carnival, among others, moved between the sculptural and the functional, always anchored by her extraordinary colour sense. Simultaneously, from 1999 to 2004, she held a professorship at Konstfack in the ceramics and glass department, and she has taught at the Pilchuck Glass School in the United States.
After leaving Kosta Boda in 2005, Sahlin stepped away from glass for several years, working instead on commissions for IKEA and the automotive industry. Her exhibition "Hortus Poetica" marked a triumphant return to art glass after an eight-year absence. In 2015, she was named Designer of the Year by Svensk Form.
Her work is represented at Nationalmuseum, Röhsska Museum, and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. On the Nordic auction market, Sahlin's glass appears most frequently at Södermanlands Auktionsverk, which alone accounts for a significant portion of her 220 lots on Auctionist. Her "Rumba" vases have reached 5,500 SEK, with signed art glass pieces typically trading between 2,000 and 5,000 SEK. The concentration in the glass category, 211 of 220 lots, underscores her singular focus on the medium.