Modern Art & Design Presents Uno Åhrén
Bukowskis presents a dining set by Swedish architect and designer Uno Åhrén, executed in the early 1920s, at this season’s major live auction Modern Art & Design.
The architect, designer, professor and urban planner Uno Åhrén became known as one of the foremost representatives of functionalism in Sweden and was part of the groundbreaking Social Housing Investigation from 1933 to 1947. Åhrén graduated as an architect from the Stockholm Institute of Technology in 1918. As a practicing architect, he made his debut with an interior at the Home Exhibition in 1917 and subsequently participated with elegant interiors at the Jubilee Exhibition in Gothenburg in 1923 and the Paris Exhibition in 1925. It was during the early 1920s that the present dining set was conceived, and the story behind it is a highly personal one.
Uno Åhrén grew up with a father deeply involved in the Christian community of Seventh-day Adventists. It was likely within that community that Åhrén, in his youth, came to know Rakel Lind, a woman a few years younger. Uno and Rakel began a relationship in the late 1910s – a story that is today shrouded in mystery. They had an intimate photo taken together, which has been preserved for posterity within both Rakel's and Uno's families.
At the request of the family, Rakel moved to the United States in the autumn of 1924 and the inevitable breakup became a fact. But before the two went their separate ways, Rakel received a dining set as a gift, designed by Uno in the period's typical Swedish Grace style, painted black on neoclassical curved rococo legs. In the USA, Rakel later met the young civil engineer Tor Gerholm, whom she married shortly afterwards in the spring of 1925. In the couple's estate division papers from 1937, the dining set is included among the wife's marital property. The set has since been in the possession of Rakel's family, and after her passing it went to her eldest son and later ended up with her grandchildren.
The set, consisting of a two-part cabinet, a dining table and eight chairs, has a design language that is typical for Åhrén during the first half of the 1920s, and bears similarities to the glossy black furniture designed by him, executed by Gemla and exhibited by David Blomberg at the Gothenburg Exhibition in 1923. Also worth noting is the structure of the upper cabinet in six fields, which recurs in the magnificent intarsia cabinet that was part of Åhrén's ladies' salon at the Paris Exhibition in 1925, today in the collections of Nationalmuseum in Stockholm (NMK 1/2018).
Furniture designed by Uno Åhrén and executed during the first half of the 1920s is exceptionally rare, and the present pieces carries a story about a past youthful love that was highly personal to the architect.
The set is being sold at Modern Art & Design
Catalogue online November 4
Viewing November 12–17, Berzelii Park 1, Stockholm
Live auction November 18–19, Arsenalsgatan 2, Stockholm
Read more about Modern Art & Design
Discover the Entire Set at Modern Art & Design
Requests & condition reports
Tukholma
Camilla Behrer
Johtaja, Design and Moderni taidekäsityö
+46 (0)708 92 19 77
Tukholma
Eva Seeman
Johtava asiantuntija, moderni ja nykyaikainen taidekäsityö & design
+46 (0)708 92 19 69
Tukholma
Karl Green
Specialist Modern an Contemporary Decorative Art & Design
+46 (0)700 07 94 25