Goode Glass FINAL (6-26-23) - Flipbook - Page 46
Bertil Vallien
I
NTERNATIONALLY renowned sculptor Bertil Vallien (born 1938) is the most prolific and
distinguished Swedish designer and artist working in glass today. Academically trained
at Konstfack, Sweden’s largest university for arts, crafts, and design, Vallien initially
worked as a designer for ceramic and porcelain factories both in his native country
and the United States. In 1963, he accepted a position at the C. H. Åfors glass factory and
immersed himself in the venerable Swedish glass industry concentrated in the Småland region.
He has since maintained both an independent design practice and a studio creating unique works
in glass, frequently in association with the Swedish glass conglomerate Kosta Boda.
Vallien’s preferred technique for creating sculptures in glass is sand casting in open molds. The
sand mold imparts a rough and semi-translucent appearance to the molten glass, which contrasts
with the transparent fluidity of the open mold’s top surface. Vallien masterfully harnesses these
visually differentiated effects to guide the viewer’s eyes to embedded abstract objects and floating
imaginary symbols frozen in dream-like settings. These subtle views into his sculptural glass forms
suggest meanings rather than literal interpretations.
The artist’s imagery is often drawn from Nordic mythology and history, with Vallien preferring to
invoke the voyages, explorations, and cultural arc of ancient peoples into modern day humanity.
The shapes of boats, rune stones, and stylized heads are recurring carriers of timeless messages.
In his series inspired by maps, Vallien chose a rectangular bas-relief as his medium to convey the
transcendental notion of human journey. Here, the sectioned curve of dark earth is set against
a dark blue sky mapped by a grid of transparent dot markers. A stylized head is embedded
in the ground, while a vertical metal lattice implies a vestige of man-made structure. On the
bottom edge, a stylized human shape of transparent glass, suggesting a past or current presence,
is suspended in a state of ambiguity — arrested in thought, entering this unspecified world, or
leaving it.
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