Daniel Rybakken receive Torsten and Wanja Söderberg Prize 2017
Daniel Rybakken, photo credit Kalle Sanner.
Röhsska Museum’s award committee for the Torsten and Wanja Söderberg Prize, funded by the Torsten Söderberg Foundation, has decided to award Daniel Rybakken this year’s prize of SEK 1 million.
The award committee’s motivation:
Daniel Rybakken successfully raises design to a higher philosophical level. He reflects on major questions such as lighting and interior design, and uses his ideas to create projects that not only follow design history, but also develop it.He uses poetic and magical effects to recreate daylight in enclosed spaces, bringing us new light.
“I feel proud and grateful. Of course, it’s amazing to receive such a prize,” says Daniel Rybakken. “For me, the working process is as important as the result.I let the work take time, wanting to find my way to my own expression.It’s always been like this for me.I want something extra to happen in the encounter with the product.I want to make people think, so it’s wonderful to have my work highlighted,” he says.
Daniel Rybakken (b.1984) was born in Oslo and trained at AHO, the Oslo School of Architecture and Design.He has a Master of Fine Arts from HDK, the Academy of Design and Crafts at the University of Gothenburg.He lives and works in Gothenburg, where he has run Studio Daniel Rybakken, in the Majorna area of the city, since 2008.
Subconsious effects of daylight, his degree project at HDK from 2008, examined how daylight influences us.One item, a table that recreated reflections from the sun on the floor, aroused attention when it was displayed at the Milan Furniture Fair that year.
Rybakken has continued to investigate light and lighting, such as his series of lamps for Italy’s Luceplan and the light installationen Daylight Entrance (Stockholm 2009), in which 6,500 LEDs in an enclosed stairwell create the illusion of daylight indoors.He has now gained international recognition as a lighting designer, with several exhibitions under his belt, such as the Layers installation in Paris in 2012.
In 2014, with no experience of furniture design at all, he was asked to work in partnership with Finland’s Artek, founded by Alvar Aalto in 1935. This led him to broaden his field of work.
This autumn, Röhsska Museum will be producing an exhibition about and with the prize-winner, Daniel Rybakken.It opens on 5 November.
The Price will be awarded on 4 November in Gothenburg.
Selected previous awards
In 2014, Daniel Rybakken was the first ever Scandnavian to receive the prestigious Italian design prize Compasso dÓro, followed by a second win in 2016. He has also received awards such as the Best of the Best, Red Dot Award (Singapore 2007), Bruno Mathsson Prize (Sweden 2011), London Design Medal (UK 2013) and Hublot Design Prize (Japan, 2015).A complete CV is available in the appendix in the press room.
The Torsten and Wanja Söderberg Prize Exhibition 2017: Daniel Rybakken
From 5 November 2017 to 18 February 2018, Röhsska Museum will display an exhibition about and with this year’s prize-winner at the Gothenburg City Library.Address: Götaplatsen 3. Free entry during the library’s opening hours, Mon-Fri 9–21, Sat–Sun 11–18. Activities linked to the exhibition will also take place. A book and a documentray film will also be produced.
The Torsten and Wanja Söderberg Prize
The Torsten and Wanja Söderberg Prize was founded by the Torsten and Ragnar Söderberg Foundations to commemorate the centenary of Torsten Söderberg’s birth. It was first awarded in 1994, when he would have celebrated his hundredth birthday.
The prize amount, SEK 1 million, funded by the Torsten Söderberg Foundation, makes the award the world’s biggest design prize.The purpose of the prize is to promote art, crafts and design in the Nordic region and to strengthen Nordic collegial partnerships.
The home of the Torsten and Wanja Söderberg Prize is Röhsska Museum in Gothenburg, and it is awarded annually at a ceremony on 4 November, Torsten Söderberg’s birthdate.Read more about the prize at: http://rohsska.se/en/t-w-soderbergs-pris
Previous prize-winners
See all prize-winners at http://rohsska.se/en/t-w-soderbergs-pris
The award committee
consists of representatives from the five Nordic countries:
Museum Director, adj. professor Anne-Louise Sommer, Designmuseum Danmark, Copenhagen; Director of Design and Decorative Arts Widar Halén, the National Museum in Oslo; Museum Director Jukka Savolainen, the Design Museum in Helsinki; Museum Director Harpa Þórsdóttir, the Icelandic Museum of Design and Applied Art, Reykjavik; PhD hcTomas Söderberg, Chairman of the Torsten and Ragnar Söderberg Foundations, and the award committee’s Chairperson, Tom Hedqvist.