21 Facts About Timo Sarpaneva

Timo Tapani Sarpaneva was an influential Finnish designer, sculptor, and educator best known in the art world for innovative work in glass, which often merged attributes of display art objects with utilitarian designations.

Timo Sarpaneva's work was among the key components that helped to launch Finland's reputation as a trailblazer of design.

Timo Sarpaneva's one-year-older brother Pentti was a graphic designer and made bronze and silver jewelry.

Timo Sarpaneva won his first Grand Prix at the 1954 Milan Triennale for his clear glass series, which went to his already well-established colleague at Iittala, Tapio Wirkkala.

In 1956, Timo Sarpaneva embraced colored glass as he developed Iittala's new upscale i-linja series of plates, bottles, and other objects.

Timo Sarpaneva commuted between Helsinki and Murano for six years in the 1990s, making mostly sculptures with the Venini glassmakers and the renowned craftsman Pino Signoretto.

All along, despite a hiatus in the 1970s when Iittala sought to cancel some of its glass production techniques, Timo Sarpaneva maintained a creative relationship with his first employer for most of his productive life.

Timo Sarpaneva was survived by his four adult children and his wife of nine years, Marjatta nee Svennevig, whom he married at Helsinki Cathedral in 1997 after 30 years of living together and who designed his tombstone at the Hietaniemi Cemetery, now closed to further burials, the last resting place of numerous people influential in Finnish history, politics, and culture.

Timo Sarpaneva designed glass vases and silver dinnerware for the presidential residence Mantyniemi opened in 1993.

Work like Timo Sarpaneva's proved that the intrinsic quality of materials reduced to their most basic, sensuous essence, shaped by the creative imagination of an artist, beat all the kitsch in the world.

Timo Sarpaneva worked intermittently with metal, wood, textiles, ceramics, and porcelain, while glass remained his main medium from his earliest awards for much of his life, both in industrial design and in display art objects.

Close to 2,000 automated machine settings, which Timo Sarpaneva called "industrial monotypes," enabled extensive variation in color schemes, from intense crimson and turquoise to subtle pea green, cream, and black.

The production was based on an invention Timo Sarpaneva made when visiting a manufacturer of packaging paper, where the printing press was malfunctioning so that the colors mixed and bled on the paper.

Timo Sarpaneva thought that achieving the same effect intentionally on cloth would create a varying, fluid pattern where exactly the same pattern would never be repeated.

Timo Sarpaneva said his inspiration came from the forms of rocks rounded and polished by moving water.

Timo Sarpaneva adjusted Suomi for customers looking to inject self-expression.

Such marketing was not always appreciated on aesthetic grounds with the argument that the decorated versions of various sorts related poorly to Timo Sarpaneva's refined shapes, and that Suomi was extraordinary only in plain white.

Timo Sarpaneva was a prolific designer of glass art, both sculpture and functional objects.

Timo Sarpaneva pioneered many new methods in glass making, together with the glassblowers of Iittala glassworks.

Timo Sarpaneva made his and Finland's largest glass sculpture, Ahtojaa, for the Finnish pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal in 1967.

Timo Sarpaneva's artistically conceived design lines gained in resale value to the degree that forgeries became profitable.