VANCOUVER.- On view October 28, 2017 to January 28, 2018, the Vancouver Art Gallery is presenting True Nordic: How Scandinavia Influenced Design in Canada/Nordique: L’Influence du design scandinave au Canada.

The exhibition, which features more than one hundred prototypes, designer originals, and limited edition and mass-produced wares designed and fabricated across the country, highlights the lasting legacy of Scandinavian design on the development of Canadian culture and design practices. Spanning more than seven decades, True Nordic reveals how Scandinavian design was introduced in Canada and how its aesthetics and material forms were adopted, changed and transformed since the 1930s.

“True Nordic presents an exceptional opportunity to celebrate Canadian designers and artists and highlight their important contribution to both national and global visual culture and design, fostering new and dynamic understandings of the world that we live in,” says Kathleen S. Bartels, Director of the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Canadians first became aware of Scandinavian design through travelling exhibitions and designer showrooms, as well as articles and advertisements in popular magazines. Admiring its understated and pragmatic ethos, Canadian designers began to emulate the material and formal qualities of Scandinavian design in goods created for the marketplace, gradually introducing local audiences to the notion of “fitness of purpose” and a modern and functional aesthetic that privileged natural materials, simplicity of shape and expressive imagery. The result was a new national design language that continues to influence artisans working today.

Designers featured in True Nordic will include: Niels Bendtsen, Bocci, Karen Bulow, Kjeld and Erica Deichmann, Thor Hansen, Andrew Jones, Janis Kravis, molo, Carl Poul Petersen, Rudolph Renzius and Marion Smith, among many others.

True Nordic is organized by the Gardiner Museum, Toronto and curated by Rachel Gotlieb and Michael Prokopow.