Orrefors

The decisive creative leap occurred between 1916 and 1917, when Ekman hired two painters with no prior experience in glass: Simon Gate and Edvard Hald, the latter a former student of Henri Matisse in Paris. Their collaboration with master glassblower Knut Bergkvist produced a series of technical and artistic breakthroughs. Around 1916 Bergkvist developed the Graal technique, in which a blank of colored glass, engraved with a design, is encased within a layer of clear crystal before being blown to its final form. The result is a smooth surface concealing layers of color and pattern within. Gate and Hald brought this method to international attention at the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs in Paris, where both artists and the glassworks itself were awarded the Grand Prix.

Further innovation followed in the 1930s when Bergkvist, working with designers Vicke Lindstrand and Edvin Ohrstrom, developed the Ariel technique. Here a blank is deeply sand-blasted or engraved before a thick overlay of glass traps air bubbles within the patterned recesses, producing a striking optical depth. In the 1940s, designer Sven Palmqvist introduced the Ravenna technique, embedding colored glass fragments in a mosaic-like network. Nils Landberg and Ingeborg Lundin extended the formal vocabulary further in the mid-century period: Lundin's Applet vase of 1955 and Landberg's Tulpan series of 1957 became defining objects of Swedish modernism.

In 1990 Orrefors merged with Kosta Boda to form Orrefors Kosta Boda AB, and in 2005 the group was acquired by New Wave AB. Production at the Orrefors factory itself ceased in 2012, though the brand continued under new ownership. The glassworks left behind a body of work spanning more than a century that is well represented at auction across the Nordic countries and internationally. Pieces by Gate, Hald, Lindstrand, Ohrstrom, Palmqvist, and Landberg appear regularly at Swedish auction houses, with Graal and Ariel works in particular drawing sustained collector interest.