Welcome home, Åke!
Åke Axelsson is celebrated for his lifetime achievement with the exhibition Velkommen hjem, Åke! [Welcome home, Åke!] held at exhibition venue Bygning A in Copenhagen. (Until 28 February 2021). Åke’s home environment and his studio in the little Swedish town of Vaxholm have been re-created in the Danish capital.
“With the exhibition which has been designed as a journey through his home and workplace in the Stockholm archipelago we celebrate Åke Axelsson’s remarkable and highly productive career. There is something special about his attitude to work and his material which provides a great source of inspiration to many people in Sweden but that has also reached us on the other side of the water”, Kari Svarre and Anders Petersen, who are jointly responsible for the exhibition explain.
With some 150 examples of Åke’s furniture designs including classic chairs, prototypes, archive materials, furniture models, working drawings, correspondence, etc., the exhibition setting has been transformed into a sort of laboratory for furniture design. The exhibition does not just talk about Åke’s furniture, but also tells us about more than 60 years of interior design commissions and his deep love of our most sustainable material: wood.
“Wood is the material of the future”, Åke maintains. “Together with the craft skills it has gained new and relevant significance. Not in a nostalgic sense, but in the effort to create better and more functional solutions for everyone”, Åke explains, busily engaged in his workshop where new prototypes are taking form. A smaller, ecological craft collection of new furniture is available for purchase from our webshop.
The media have been enthusiastic about the exhibition. The design critic of the leading Danish daily, Politiken, Lars Medebo Olsen wrote about a miraculous exhibition with furniture that lets us meet Åke as a person with a profoundly humanistic approach. Åke is a functionalist with an assured sense of style that the Danish furniture industry ought to study in great detail. The cult surrounding master furniture designers like Finn Juhl and Hans Wegener and Danish perfectionist cabinetmakers has something to learn here, according to Lars Medebo Olsen.
Scandinaviandesign.com writes that Åke’s designs are timelessly relevant and that his holistic ideas pertaining to function, sustainability and economy mean that his furniture is adapted to the future with its ecological challenges. Åke himself undertook his first skype interview with the London-based magazine Monocle which has written about the exhibition and about Åke’s striking career.
The exhibition continues until 1.08. 2021.
Bygning A/A. Petersen is situated at Kløvermarksvej No. 70.