The Torsten and Wanja Söderberg Prize 2016 is awarded to the Danish textile designer Margrethe Odgaard.

Gothenburg
24 May 2016 

The Torsten and Wanja Söderberg Prize 2016 is awarded to the Danish textile designer Margrethe Odgaard.

The Röhsska Museum award committee for the Torsten and Wanja Söderberg Prize, funded by the Torsten Söderberg Foundation, has decided to award Margrethe Odgaard this year’s prize of SEK 1 million.

The award committee’s motivation:
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.

The Danish textile designer Margrethe Odgaard (born 1978) trained at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts Schools of Architecture, Design and Conservation, before going on to study at the Rhode Island School of Design in the US. Her focuses as a textile designer are colour, pattern, and tactility. She constantly looks for new ways to explore colour and pattern in the material. 

In 2013, Margrethe Odgaard established her own design studio in Copenhagen. Prior to this she worked as a printing assistant at The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia in the US, followed by seven years as a textile designer for the fashion company EPICE in Paris. There she developed colours and patterns, and oversaw production in India.

In addition to running her own studio, she is part of the Included Middle design duo with furniture designer Chris L. Halstrøm. Together they design furniture on the basis of two simple questions ”What if colour or pattern is seen as something suggesting form?”, and ”what if form is seen as something suggesting a pattern?”.

The Torsten and Wanja Söderberg Prize
The Torsten and Wanja Söderberg Prize is administered by the Röhsska Museum in Gothenburg and is awarded annually at a ceremony on 4 November, Torsten Söderberg’s birthday. From 5 November 2016, the Röhsska Museum will host an exhibition by and featuring this year’s winner. The Torsten and Wanja Söderberg Prize was inaugurated by the Torsten and Ragnar Söderberg Foundations to commemorate the centenary of Torsten Söderberg’s birth. It was awarded for the first time on that centenary in 1994.

The SEK 1 million prize, funded by the Torsten Söderberg Foundation, makes it the world’s biggest annual design prize where the winner is chosen by an award committee. The aim of the prize is to promote arts, crafts and design in the Nordic region and to strengthen collegial Nordic collaboration. 

The jury consists of representatives from the five Nordic countries:

Museum Director adj. professor Anne-Louise Sommer from Designmuseum Danmark in Copenhagen; Director of Design and Decorative Arts Widar Halén of Norway’s National Museum in Oslo; Museum Director Jukka Savolainen of the Finnish Design Museum in Helsinki; Museum Director Harpa Þórsdóttir of the Icelandic Museum of Design and Applied Art in Reykjavik; Tomas Söderberg, PhD h.c., Chairman of the Torsten Söderberg Foundation; and award committee Chairman Tom Hedqvist.