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Bertjan Pot
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Bertjan Pot was born in 1975 in Nieuwleusen, the Netherlands. He studied at the Design Academy Eindhoven, graduating in 1998 from the Man and Identity programme with a project called the Knitted Lamp. The Academy's environment oriented him toward materials and processes as primary starting points for design rather than form-giving from a sketch. That approach has defined his practice ever since.
In 1999 Pot developed what became the Random Light: he saturated knitted fibreglass yarn in epoxy resin and coiled it randomly around an inflatable balloon mould, which he then deflated and removed. The result was a self-supporting, semi-transparent globe that glows from within. Marcel Wanders encountered the prototype, and Moooi took three years to engineer it for production. The lamp launched commercially in 2001 or 2002 and quickly became one of the best-recognised objects in contemporary design. It entered the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
In 2003 Pot applied the same coiling logic to the Random Chair, winding epoxy-saturated carbon fibre over a mould to produce a seat with no metal frame. The chair won the Materiaalfondsprijs in 2003. He then collaborated with Marcel Wanders on the Carbon Chair (2004), a refined version using the same carbon-fibre technique; that piece entered the collections of MoMA New York, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam.
Also for Moooi, Pot developed the Heracleum lamp (from 2010 onward), a branching pendant in which LED clusters mimic a cow-parsley flowerhead. The design made Wanders's ELECTROSANDWICH conductive-coating technology central to its structure, making it a genuine collaboration between the two designers. Later Moooi pieces include NR2. Beyond lighting, Pot has designed furniture for Montis, Established and Sons, Wrong for Hay, and Cassina, and he has worked with Nike and the AUDAX Textielmuseum Tilburg on textile-based projects. He opened Studio Bertjan Pot in Rotterdam in 2003.
His work is held in the permanent collections of MoMA New York, the V&A London, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen Rotterdam, and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. He received the Dutch Design Prize in 2007, the IF Gold Award in 2007, the Profiel Prijs in 2004, the Elle Deco Award in 2005, and the SANOMA Woon Award in 2007.
On Auctionist, Pot's 33 recorded lots are almost entirely ceiling lights, with the overwhelming majority handled by Stockholms Auktionsverk across its Stockholm and Sickla locations. The Heracleum series leads auction results: a Heracleum III Small in nickel achieved 15,500 SEK, and a Heracleum II reached 12,200 SEK. Random Light lots have sold between approximately 3,170 SEK and 3,900 EUR.