Anna Kraitz Exhibition – furniture, porcelain, objects and thoughts

I am trying to grasp the world around me, my everyday life. I reach out, try to understand, gather things together, search, depict, tell stories big and small. I tell my version of life with my things. Everything spins so fast — events whirl past, things exist in abundance, our world overflows. And yet I must keep telling my stories.

That Anna Kraitz became a mother a few years ago is more sensed than stated in her most recent work.

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In the new limited series of porcelain vases “Early Bird,” she has developed the playfulness she has previously demonstrated — as in the vase with protruding colourful buttons as the sole decoration on its neck, or the vase with a waist cinched by a belt. Everything rendered in intricate detail and colour — entirely in porcelain.

Her daughter Beatrix has lent her name to the armchair produced by Källemo since 2007. New to the exhibition is a sofa in the same series: a soft and undulating form where the buttons in the back upholstery shift from symmetry into chaos.

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The exhibition also presents a selection of porcelain, furniture and lamps designed over the past few years.

Anna Kraitz was awarded the Bruno Mathsson Prize in September of this year. In its citation, the Mathsson Foundation notes that Anna Kraitz follows her own path with a strong artistic intuition. By thoroughly exploring possibilities, she creates her own freedom — and then takes responsibility for it by acting as an entrepreneur as well. Her assured and often surprising sense of form and function always carries a dimension of humour.

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In a presentation of Anna Kraitz, Hedvig Hedqvist writes: “Anna Kraitz is a storyteller who has boldly demonstrated the strength of working without a client. In her world, furniture are works of art that speak both to us and with each other. There is always personality and presence in her expressions — the objects must be able to stand on their own.”

Anna Kraitz trained as a designer at the Academy of Fine Arts, Budapest, as well as at Pernby’s School of Painting and Beckmans College of Design.

Anna Kraitz has worked with the rubber-like material polyurethane for nearly seven years, taming the dense material into wildly swelling forms of her own invention. She has received recognition and awards for a personal design language that stands apart from prevailing minimalist restraint. It began with a small sofa — traditionally constructed but with a new and joyful expression. The sofa was her graduation project at Beckmans. For Kraitz, it was natural to draw on her own experience of sitting — always with her feet tucked beneath her. The result was a sofa suited precisely to that position. The asymmetric sofa/chaise longue (almost symmetric if two are placed together) has since been joined by a smaller sibling: an armchair with a similarly wilful character. The cup You is another example of form adapted to physical ease. The You family has expanded to include a teapot and a candleholder, whose physiognomies look as though they were cut straight from Alice in Wonderland.