Six Decades of Swedish Glass Art at Kosta Boda

Bertil Vallien (born 1938) is one of Sweden’s most celebrated glass artists, known internationally for his pioneering work with sand-cast glass at Kosta Boda.

Over a career spanning more than six decades, Vallien has elevated glass from a craft medium to a vehicle for complex narrative and emotion, establishing himself as a central figure in Scandinavian design history.

Vallien studied at Konstfack in Stockholm before receiving a scholarship that took him to the United States and Mexico in the early 1960s — a journey that proved formative. Encounters with pre-Columbian art and American ceramics deeply influenced his visual language, which has always moved between the mythological and the archetypal.

He joined Kosta Boda in 1963, and his relationship with the glassworks has continued ever since. There, Vallien developed his signature technique: sand-casting, a method in which molten glass is poured into sand moulds to create forms with organic, time-worn surfaces. The results — often boat-shaped, often incorporating suspended figures and objects within the glass itself — appear as if retrieved from another time.

His works are represented in major museum collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C., and the National Museum of Sweden. Vallien has also produced large-scale public commissions across Europe and the United States.

Within Swedish design, Vallien occupies a rare position: technically rigorous yet consistently poetic, rooted in craft tradition while remaining entirely singular in expression. His contribution to Kosta Boda — and to Swedish glass as a whole — remains without parallel.