Saara Hopea

The decisive turn in her career came when she began working under Kaj Franck at Arabia ceramics and the Nuutajärvi Notsjö glassworks in the early 1950s. Originally hired to assist with showroom interiors, she was quickly drawn into product design, creating ceramic wares for Arabia and glassware for Nuutajärvi. Working alongside Franck, she absorbed the functionalist conviction that everyday objects should be beautiful without ornament, that form should follow use. Her glass designs from this period - stacking tumblers, bowls, vases - were characterised by clean geometry, smooth silhouettes, and colour palettes that ran from smoke and amber to soft pinks and greens. Pieces like the Krokus/Nyppylä bowl series (1952), the stackable drinking glass 1718, and the Traviata wine glasses became standards in the Nuutajärvi catalogue. The stacking tumbler earned her a silver medal at the Milan Triennale in 1954, and the Flamingo liqueur glass brought a second silver medal at the same exhibition in 1957.

In 1954 she met Oppi Untracht, an American metalsmith, photographer and writer who had come to Finland to research craft traditions. They married in 1960 and moved to New York, where Untracht taught enamelling at the Brooklyn Museum Art School. Hopea learned the technique from him and developed it in her own direction, overfiring transparent enamels on copper to produce layered, luminous surfaces with an almost painterly spontaneity. The couple later spent four years travelling in Nepal and India, studying and collecting local metalwork and jewellery, before returning to Porvoo in 1967.

Back in Finland, Hopea took on the role of artistic director at the family firm Ossian Hopea in Porvoo, designing silver jewellery - rings, bracelets, cufflinks - whose spare, structural forms carried the same functionalist sensibility as her glass work. She also worked in silversmithing, textile design, and continued with enamel. Her work from this period entered collections at the Porvoo Museum, which dedicated a major retrospective to her in 1980. She died in Porvoo on 25 June 1984 at the age of 58. Today, 28 of her pieces are held by the British Museum in London, 11 by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and further works by the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum and the V&A.

On the Nordic auction market, Hopea's work appears regularly at Finnish and Swedish houses. Bukowskis Helsinki and Hagelstam & Co are the primary venues, accounting for the majority of the 41 lots tracked on Auctionist. Glass dominates the category spread - Nuutajärvi bowls, vases, and tableware sets - but silver jewellery pieces from the Ossian Hopea workshop in Porvoo also appear with frequency. Top recorded prices include 1,300 EUR for a Nuutajärvi glass work and 1,000 EUR for a lot catalogued at Hagelstam. Complete sets of the Traviata wine glasses and Krokus/Nyppylä bowl series attract consistent collector interest.