ArtistFinnish
Marjatta Metsovaara
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Marjatta Metsovaara grew up around yarn and colour. Her father had founded Suomen Matto Oy, a carpet manufacturer in Urjala, and she later recalled that a childhood visit to choose patterns for the factory was the moment she decided she would spend her life with textiles. She enrolled at the Taideteollinen oppilaitos in Helsinki - now part of Aalto University - and graduated as a textile designer in 1949.
She began her career in the family business but quickly assumed creative control, and in 1954 the company was renamed Metsovaara Oy and refocused on art textiles: fabrics, ryijy rugs, shawls. She was simultaneously artistic director and, later, CEO - an unusual combination that gave her both the creative freedom to experiment and the commercial leverage to pursue large institutional commissions. Her approach to colour was expansive from the start, and she designed across categories without distinguishing between applied craft and fine art.
The pivotal year was 1960, when she received a gold medal at the Milan Triennale XII. Two years later she designed the 'Kukka' pattern for Tampella - a cotton-satin print that became her most widely reproduced work, used in curtains, garments, and interior applications across Finland. That same year she founded a weaving mill in Sint-Niklaas, Belgium, where she could produce large-scale jacquard textiles unavailable in Finland. The Belgian operation brought her to the top tier of international contract furnishing: the Berliner Philharmoniker, the White House, city theatres in Finland, and the Hilton and Four Seasons hotel chains all took her fabrics for their interiors.
Metsovaara worked across wool, cotton, synthetic fibres, and experimental blends, always drawn to materials that challenged conventional weave structures. Her printed fabrics carry a graphic boldness characteristic of 1960s Finnish design, yet her jacquard work operates in a different register - structured, tactile, suited to large architectural surfaces. She won the Signe d'Or Industriel and was awarded the Pro Finlandia Medal in 1970. Her work is held in the collection of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York. After her husband's death in 1984 she spent increasing time on the French Riviera, though she returned to Urjala each summer. She died in Italy in December 2014.
Metsovaara's presence at Nordic auction houses reflects both the endurance of her designs and the renewed collector interest in postwar Finnish applied arts. Auctionist records 11 lots across Auktionshuset Kolonn, Formstad, Bukowskis Stockholm, and Hagelstam and Co. The 'Aalto' curtain lengths for Tampella sold at 600 SEK and 'Niili' curtain pieces at 300 SEK - modest prices for functional textiles in everyday formats, though her ryijy rugs and rarer printed fabric runs command considerably stronger results on specialist markets.