Danish Margrethe Odgaard opens new doors

The Danish designer Margrethe Odgaard is this year’s winner of the Torsten and Wanja Söderberg Prize. Odgaard’s creative output spans a range of different disciplines, unified by her great attention to detail and her interest in what is unique and individual in each project she engages in. Her award exhibition at the Röhsska Museum provides a colourful display showcasing the artist’s work and opens its doors on Saturday 5, 2016.

Margrethe Odgaard (born 1978) is a strong figure in the new generation of textile designers in Denmark. After her graduation in 2005, she worked as a textile designer in Philadelphia and later in Paris until setting up her own design studio in Copenhagen in 2013. She has received both national and international awards and recognition for her work with textiles, colours and patterns. The Copenhagen-based artist has collaborated with several notable design producers, among them Georg Jensen Damask, Muuto, Ikea, Hay and Skagerak.

Odgaard often explore design through interdisciplinary collaborations and has collaborated with architects, fashion designers, musicians and chefs to share knowledge, ideas, experiments and techniques in order to create products and experiences of excellence in form, function and visual image.

In its award statement, the Röhsska Museum’s award committee characterizes her work and working method as follows:

“Margrethe Odgaard uses textiles as her basis for design. By thinking with her hands, her approach is at once artisan, tactile, and well thought through. Using both poetic and consistent colour and pattern studies, Odgaard creates coherence in a breath-taking process that is imbued with musicality. Her artistic vision is propelled by her desire for creation and enrichment in which knowledge, ideas, and skills are shared generously and with perseverance.”

As a result of her dedicated work with colours Odgaard has developed her own colour index, the Popsicle Index, which she uses and further develops in her different projects.

“It's all about colour, pattern and texture. In my work and my collaborations I constantly search for new and interesting ways to challenge our subconscious patterns of behaviour and renew our vows with our senses." explains Margrethe Odgaard.

The Torsten and Wanja Söderberg Prize was established in 1994 by the Torsten and Ragnar Söderberg Foundations, to commemorate the centenary of Torsten Söderberg’s birth. Since 2014, it has been funded by the Torsten Söderberg Foundation. Awarded annually to a prominent designer from one of the Nordic countries, the prize, amounting to SEK 1 million, is the largest of its kind in the design world. The award recipient is selected by a committee composed of representatives from the Röhsska Museum and its sister institutions in the Nordic countries.

The exhibition at the Röhsska Museum is on display November 5, 2016 to February, 19 2017.
The opening takes place Saturday, November 5 at 12.00, with Margrethe Odgaard present.

More about the exhibition at Röhsska Museum: http://rohsska.se/en/t-w-soderbergs-pris/arets-pris/