The Torsten and Wanja Söderberg Prize is awarded each year in Sweden to a working Nordic designer or craftsperson. This year’s prizewinner is Ilkka Suppanen, who studied architecture at the Helsinki University of Technology and interior and furniture design at the University of Art and Design Helsinki and the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam before founding Studio Suppanen.
Suppanen has created furniture, lamps and other products for Finnish and international companies, including Artek, Marimekko, Iittala, Woodnotes, Vivero, Cappellini, Leucos and Zanotta.
According to the prize’s award committee, “Ilkka Suppanen’s design is characterized by time and thought. Time for thought. With trust and a humanistic eye, he puts substance before style and the person before design. In Ilkka Suppanen’s world, the complicated is made simple, and the simple large.”
His work will be exhibited at the Design Museum Gallery in Helsinki until March 27.
“An important feature of Ilkka Suppanen’s exhibition is the ceiling installation ‘Wood Cloud,’ specifically made with the prize exhibition in mind. It consists of approximately a thousand thin pieces of wood ‘freely’ hovering above the exhibits placed in frames filled with quartz sand. The restrained and harmonious nature of the exhibition reflects Ilkka Suppanen’s thinking concerning the environment and social responsibility,” says the Design Museum’s Katarina Siltavuori, who curated the exhibition.
Suppanen’s work has been exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Milan Furniture Fair, and MoMA in New York, and appears in permanent collections of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Museum für Angewandte Kunst in Cologne, among others.
