24 augusti – 29 september 2013

Jonas Bohlin

Jonas Bohlin was born in Stockholm 1953, GCE at A level from technical high school 1974 and examined Interior Architect from Konstfack, The National College of Art, Craft and Design in Stockholm 1981.

Being a designer with an artistical approach to his work, Jonas Bohlin always crosses the borderlines ­ but without losing the connections. The connections to architecture, to functions, to life itself.

Since the beginning of his career the mixture of emotion and common sense in design has been the very means for his success. As much as you never can separate a design´s form from its function, you¹re not able to distinguish its emotional contents from its value.

Jonas Bohlin started off by making a kind of scandalous success in terms of offended Swedish functionalism at the 1981 graduation show at Konstfack, the National College of Arts, Craft and Design, in Stockholm. We never quite recoverd from the shock his chair ”Concrete” created in the Swedish design community. Being meant as a piece of sculpture in an artistic installation, the chair of steel and concrete was obviuosly epitomizing a Swedish idea of post-modernism, why it was produced in a limited edition, and is currently a collector´s item.

The project LIV also gave birth to a lot of new Bohlin design. A range of objects which are natural new members of the big family of things ­ members but still individuals. To me Jonas Bohlin¹s design always have a very sociable quality ­ they are great friends in an otherwise mixed company.”

Ulf Beckman
Editor, FORM Design Magazine
1998-07-01