ArtistNorwegian
Tone Vigeland
0 active items
Born in Oslo on 6 August 1938, Tone Vigeland came from one of Norway's most significant artistic dynasties. Her great-uncle Gustav Vigeland created the Frogner Sculpture Park; her grandfather Emanuel and her aunt Maria were painters. Growing up surrounded by that creative density, she chose a path that diverged from the family's monumental tradition - she worked small, at the scale of the body, and spent six decades proving that intimacy of scale is no limit to ambition.
She trained at the Norwegian National Academy of Craft and Art Industry from 1955 to 1957, studying under goldsmiths Oskar Sørensen and Sigurd Alf Eriksen. After graduating she secured an apprenticeship at the metal workshop at PLUS in Fredrikstad, the cooperative that became a laboratory for Norwegian modernist craft. The PLUS years, from 1959 to 1961, immersed her in the Scandinavian Design vocabulary - geometric clarity, material honesty, forms that required no ornament beyond their own structure. She left in 1963 to run her own studio, and in doing so helped establish the small independent workshop as a credible model for Norwegian goldsmiths.
Her early work of the 1960s sits clearly within the Scandinavian tradition, bearing traces of the Swedish artist Torun Bülow-Hübe. Simple hemispheres, tubular segments, interlocking squares - all joined by tiny invisible rings into pieces that moved with the wearer. The 'Sling' earrings, sculptural loops that coil around the ear, became among her most recognised pieces. But Vigeland was not content to refine a formula. Through the 1970s and 1980s she pushed into harder terrain: hammered steel nails, lengths of silver wire knitted almost like textile, constructions that evoked chainmail and Viking metalwork without quoting either. The associations with armour and ancient craft pleasing to her, even if they were not the starting point.
International recognition arrived with a solo show at Electrum Gallery in London in 1981, a decisive moment for any artist-jeweler of that generation. From there her work entered collections at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, MoMA in New York, the Cooper Hewitt, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. A major retrospective toured in 2017-2018, organised by Nordenfjeldske Kunstindustrimuseum, Die Neue Sammlung in Munich, and Norwegian Crafts - a rare institutional acknowledgement of how thoroughly her career had reshaped the field.
In the mid-1990s she moved the work outward. Nails, stone, piano wire, lead, steel and silver became the materials of wall pieces and freestanding installations that occupied gallery space rather than the human body. The shift was not a departure but a scaling-up of the same modular thinking she had applied to jewelry: repetitive units, accumulated structures, tension between the individual element and the whole.
She received the Prince Eugen Medal in 1988, was appointed Commander of the Order of St. Olav in 1996, and received the Golden Ring of Honor from the Association for Goldsmiths' Art in Hanau in 2008. She died on 18 March 2024, aged 85.
On the Nordic auction market her work circulates primarily through Norwegian houses, with Grev Wedels Plass Auksjoner in Oslo handling the majority of her appearances on the platform. The 11 recorded lots include both jewelry pieces - earrings from the 'Sling' series, bracelets in sterling silver - and works catalogued under fine art. The top recorded sale is a silver bracelet at 60,000 NOK, with other pieces trading in the 3,000-6,000 SEK and 2,800-5,600 NOK range. Swedish houses including Stockholms Auktionsverk, Skånes Auktionsverk, and Kaplans Auktioner have also offered her work.