ArtistNorwegian
Tias Eckhoff
3 active items
Mathias Gerhard Eckhoff - known to everyone as Tias - grew up in Vestre Slidre in rural Norway and went on to shape the tables of postwar Scandinavia more thoroughly than almost any other single designer. Born in 1926, he trained as a ceramist at the Statens Haandverks- og kunstindustriskole in Oslo from 1945 to 1949, with an interlude studying under Nathalie Krebs at the Saxbo pottery in Copenhagen. Both experiences grounded him in materials thinking rather than surface decoration, an approach that would run through everything he made.
His career at Porsgrunds Porselænsfabrik, which he joined in 1949 and led as artistic director from 1952 to 1960, produced a series of durable postwar classics. The ribbed coffee service "Det riflede" (1952) in feldspar porcelain remains one of the cleaner expressions of Norwegian functionalism, and his Glohane cookware range (1955-1959) earned a gold medal at the 1957 Milan Triennale. He approached ceramics as a problem of production logic as much as form - each piece had to work on a factory floor as well as a kitchen table.
In 1953 he entered and won the Georg Jensen competition held to mark the Danish silversmith's 50th anniversary. The resulting "Cypress" flatware pattern, released in 1954, became one of the defining objects of midcentury Scandinavian design. Its organic, tapering handles and deliberate restraint won him the Lunning Prize the same year and gold medals at the Milan Triennale in 1954, 1957, and 1960. Cypress has remained in continuous production and is collected internationally. He followed it with the "Eckhoff" range in stainless steel with palisander handles for Dansk Knivfabrik, then the more architecturally resolved "Opus" (1959) and "Fuga" (1962) lines.
His work spans ceramics, silver, stainless steel, glass, and furniture - the Ana and Tomi stacking chairs from the 1980s round out a career that refused to settle in any single discipline. Works by Eckhoff are held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the Nasjonalmuseet in Oslo. He received the Jacob Prize in 1974 and died in 2016 at the age of 89.
On the Nordic auction market, Eckhoff's work appears most often as cutlery sets, with Cypress and Opus pieces circulating at Swedish and Danish houses including Göteborgs Auktionsverk, Bruun Rasmussen, and Palsgaard Kunstauktioner. Of the 18 lots recorded on Auctionist, the strongest result is a complete Opus cutlery set that sold for 4,341 SEK. Silver items, stainless steel cutlery, and occasional furniture appear across the listings.