KunstenaarSwedish
Bertil Vallien
81 actieve items
Bertil Vallien's sandcast glass boats drift through museum collections and private homes like vessels from a mythology that exists only in his imagination. Heads, maps, stars, crosses, and pyramids float suspended in blue-grey glass, visible through surfaces that bear the rough, weathered texture of the sand moulds in which they were formed. No other living glass artist has so completely fused sculptural ambition with symbolic narrative, and no other has done it at Vallien's scale, over sixty years of continuous production, with more than 1,300 works circulating on the Nordic auction market alone.
Born in 1938 in Sollentuna, north of Stockholm, Vallien was accepted into Konstfack at seventeen, where he studied ceramics under Stig Lindberg from 1957 to 1961, graduating top of his class with a Royal Foundation grant. A period in Los Angeles working for Hal Fromhold Ceramics exposed him to the California art scene before he returned to Sweden in 1963, invited to join the Åfors glass factory in Småland during a critical reorganisation. What was meant to be a transitional role became his life's work. Glass offered artistic possibilities ceramics could not: transparency, light, the ability to embed objects and images within a solid form. By the late 1960s, the Åfors glassworks was essentially devoted to his output.
Vallien perfected the sand-casting technique through the 1970s, pouring molten glass into moulds of compacted sand that left each piece with an unrepeatable surface of pits, marks, and irregularities. His iconic boat series, created between 1984 and 1988, became his defining work, vessels in every sense, carrying symbolic freight through glass oceans. The boats evolved into a broader vocabulary of heads, totems, and monumental sculptures, including the altar "Fiat Lux" for Växjö Cathedral (2002), a triptych with movable glass wings exploring the passage from darkness to light. In October 2023, the Corning Museum of Glass hosted "Passing Through," the largest exhibition of his work in the United States, celebrating six decades of creation.
Vallien headed the glass department at Konstfack from 1967 to 1984, shaping the next generation of Swedish glass artists. He received the Prince Eugen Medal in 1995 and a Gold Medal from the Royal Academy of Sciences in 2005. His work is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Corning Museum of Glass, and the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.
On Auctionist, 1,302 Vallien lots are recorded, among the highest counts for any creator on the platform. Glass dominates (1,046 items), with sculptures (48) and ceramics (54) also represented. Växjö Auktionskammare, Helsingborgs Auktionskammare, and Metropol handle the largest volumes. His sandcast boat sculptures command top prices, with a unique "Båt" reaching 81,000 SEK and a stoneware horse sculpture at 70,500 SEK. Production pieces from Kosta Boda trade at more accessible levels, making Vallien's work available to collectors at every price point.