Ynge Gamlin Tornrosa 1954

During the 1950s the Swedish textile company Nordiska Kompaniet, under the leadership of Astrid Sampe, took great strides in the process of opening up the world of textile design to the new ideas and influences of the post war culture that had spread rapidly since the end of the Second World war.

Sampe was particularly interested in injecting textile design and the larger interiors design market, with some of the aspects of the contemporary art movement of the 1950s, with particular emphasis on abstract expressionism.

Sampe commissioned a number of leading Swedish textile designers, as well as designers outside the field of textiles, fine artists, and even individuals with no history of design training at all, she even included a nuclear scientist.

In 1954 Sampe produced the ambitious Signed Textiles collection, with contributions from contemporary artists, architects and designers across Sweden. One of the designers she commissioned for the collection was Ynge Gamlin who produced the Tornrosa design shown here.

Gamlin's design piece is a good example of the direction in which Sampe was taking Swedish textile design in the 1950s. The design itself appears at first glance to be purely nature based with a dense overlapping sequence of coloured branches and foliage. However, the design could also be seen as a homage to the contemporary abstract expressionist movement, made famous by the likes of Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. Sampe encouraged experimentation within the textile design discipline and was keen to see what abstraction would do the medium. However, she always believed that experimentation should be framed within a design discipline and used the phrase Order is Liberty to emphasise that fact.

Sampe was keen to bring together as many of the strands of contemporary creativity as she was able to, in order to produce an interior that would be worthy of the new world being entered by the population in the 1950s.

The work done by designers such as Gamlin and the organisational skills of Sampe, helped to push the boundaries of both textile design and the larger interior design world, so that the 1950s and 1960s were to see a whole raft of development ideas, much of it deriving from Scandinavia. Mediums such as furniture, ceramic, glass, metal, wallpaper and textile design were to see some of the most accomplished, innovative and experimental design work of the twentieth century.