Iconic Arne Jacobsen dining chairs get a new colour palette

Danish company Fritz Hansen has joined forces with design curator and gallerist Carla Sozzani to present ‘A Sense of Colour’, a collection featuring iconic Arne Jacobsen chairs in a novel colour palette.

The plywood designs, originally conceived by Jacobsen between 1952 and 1957 and still successfully in production to this day, feature nimble silhouettes and a stackable structure. Their sinuous lines are a recurring element in all of Jacobsen’s production, from the embracing Egg chair to the slim lines of his dining chairs. Fritz Hansen has been producing the Danish design master’s work and preserving his legacy, also mixing it with new contemporary influences that keep the design memory alive. 

Carla Sozzani worked closely with Fritz Hansen’s head of design Christian Andresen to select a warm palette of 16 new shades. The early steps of the collaboration included some colour workshops at Sozzani’s Paris studio, narrowing down the palette. ‘One of the primary goals were to create a collection united by a warm tone, a red thread so to speak,’ explains Andersen. ‘This was achieved by every colour having a splash of red.’

The ‘A Sense of Colour’ collection includes deep red, blue and green shades punctuated by yellow, orange and pastels as well as neutral touches of clay and beige. ‘From the dark green and blue of shifting waves and sky, to the pinks and ochres of small shells and a fading seashore in twilight, the palette came naturally as I explored the essence of daylight and its partner: night, to capture the essence of our shared colour harmonies,’ Sozzani explains poetically. Her approach to colour is closely linked to light and darkness, and the resulting chromatic composition she curated is played on the tension between the two. 

‘I imagined what Mr. Jacobsen might have thought when he made his first palette [for the Series 7 chair] in 1955. Perhaps, as the North and South Poles are always in relationship, he also explored this relation between the light and the darkness,’ ponders Sozzani. ‘Because both Italy and Denmark are bound by our relationship to the sea, the colours and influences of the objects of the sea – shells and seaweeds; small sea creatures, and the sands along the beaches – offered naturally a spectrum of colour possibilities to explore.’

INFORMATION

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