Born in Denmark, Mathias Bengtsson is a top product designer who is famous for pushing the boundaries of technology and for working with diverse industrial materials and processes. Inspired by aerospace engineering and fabricated with technologically innovative practices, he studied furniture design at the Danish College of Design and attended the Art Centre College in Switzerland. One Hundred Edition provides you some of the most iconic pieces made by Mathias Bengtsson.
“I always start work with a pen and paper or brush: drawing provides the shortest distance between an idea in your imagination and a form. The problems are than how you ‘translate’ an analog idea into digital data, and how you can produce a digital design by hand.”
Mathias Bengtsson
He describes himself as a designer, but his works are closer to fine art than traditional industrial design. As one of the best product designers, he pushes forward the sculptural, technical, and philosophical possibilities of three-dimensional design. For him, it is important that the unfamiliarity of his creative works is countered by a familiar frame of reference. The top product designer prefers to create “tension” among achieving functionality and distilling ideas about the big issues of design.
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For Bengtsson, his unorthodox methods, and insistence on combining craft skills with mechanical means help his works accrue several levels of meaning. Since starting his own design studio in 2002, Mathias Bengtsson has deployed lasers, high-tech fibers, and computer programs to design pieces that are at once biomorphic and futuristic, such as a chair patterned after bone regeneration.
Some of Mathias Bengtsson’s works have entered the permanent collections of institutions including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Contemporary Art Museum Houston, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and the Manchester Art Gallery.
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