Ingegerd Silow

Silow trained at Högre Konstindustriella Skolan (later Konstfack) in Stockholm, at Kunsthåndværkerskolen in Copenhagen, and at Handarbetets Vänners Vävskola, the venerable Stockholm weaving school connected to Sweden's foremost institution for advanced textile design. She gained further practical experience at textile firms in Borås. Her early career placed her at the heart of Swedish craft infrastructure: she designed patterns for Svensk Hemslöjd and Hemslöjdsförbundet för Sverige before establishing herself as a freelance designer.

Her primary industrial partnership was with Axeco AB in Stockholm, for whom she designed flatweave rugs from the 1960s onward. One design, "Örbyhus," named for a fifteenth-century Swedish castle, remains in production today. She also worked with Eric Ewers AB on a project titled "Var mans egendom" (Everyone's Property), a name that crystallizes her democratic philosophy: making quality, hand-woven textiles accessible to ordinary Swedish households during the postwar housing expansion. The rölakan technique she championed, a Scandinavian flatweave method that produces double-sided, weft-faced textiles related to Middle Eastern kilim traditions, was both practical and beautiful: hard-wearing, stain-resistant, and reversible.

Silow's early designs drew from Swedish folk textile heritage, the eight-pointed star, the cross, the hourglass, modernized through dramatic scale and an expanded color palette far beyond the conventional red-yellow-black-green. Later work incorporated influences from the American Southwest and Mexico: Navajo blanket motifs, stylized feathers, mountain forms. What distinguishes a Silow rug from her contemporaries, upon close examination, is her chromatic sophistication: each color field incorporates subtle undertones of other hues present in the composition, creating a distinctive "cloud" of tonal harmony rather than flat, discrete zones.

Her work is held by the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm and was exhibited at Liljevalchs Konsthall. On Auctionist, carpets and textiles account for the vast majority of her 268 items, appearing most frequently at Formstad Auktioner, Bukowskis Stockholm, and Stockholms Auktionsverk. Large rölakan rugs command the strongest prices: a handwoven flatweave reached 13,000 DKK at a Danish house, while examples at Swedish auctions have sold for 12,513 EUR and over 10,000 SEK. Her signed pieces, always bearing the woven "IS," remain among the most sought-after mid-century Swedish textiles on the Nordic secondary market.