Hasta La Ideas

by Richard Prime

With a brutish form and use of volcanic black material, Swedish designer Jakob Solgren’s teapot makes a bold statement in a field often considered a defining one in an industrial designer’s career. The humble vessel, providing ample opportunities for personal twists on the spout or the handle, not only functions as a design rite of passage but is also an object all designers seem to revisit.

At the recent Formex exhibition, the so-called “meeting place for Nordic design,” Solgren’s pot, named “Wood You Like a Cup of Tea,” stood out as one of the few gems at the show. Openly contributing to the obsessive tradition of the bizarre teapot culture, Solgren traces the inspiration of the piece—created from delicately-sculptured black stoneware—back to the Trompe l´Oil of the 17th Century. “This teapot serves as an inconceivable portrait of nature and creates an extraordinary lure to the border between fiction and reality,” explains Solgren.

Within weeks of its first showing at Milan last year,
Gallery S.Bensimon in Paris snapped up two of the five pieces he made. For €1,500, buying one of the remaining five makes a nice investment in this young talent’s future. Email Solgren (jakobsolgren [at] gmail [dot] com) to make an inquiry.

See detail and another angle after the jump.