Margrethe Odgaard

Textile and colour designer Margrethe Odgaard approach colour as a rich sensory experience. By immersing herself in the intricate interplay of colour, material, and light, she seeks a deeper understanding of how we experience and emotionally connect with our physical surroundings.

Balancing her time between commercial collaborations with renowned companies like Kvadrat, Muuto, Montana, HAY, and IKEA, and an artistic practice rooted in self-initiated research and unique work, Odgaard has showcased her work in solo exhibitions at prominent museums such as Willumsen’s Museum (DK), Röhsska Museum (SE), Designmuseo Helsinki (FI), and Munkeruphus (DK). Since 2023, she has  been associated with the Parisian gallery Maria Wettergreen, where her unique works are exhibited and made available for purchase

Her work has garnered numerous prizes and awards, including the Three-year work grant from The Danish Arts Foundation in 2015, the prestigious Torsten & Wanja Söderberg Prize in 2016 and most recent The Art, Design, and Architecture Prize from the Einar Hansen og Hustru fru Vera Hansens Fond in 2023.

Before setting up her design studio in 2013, Odgaard worked as a printing assistant at The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, USA, followed by seven years as textile designer in the French fashion company EPICE. She graduated from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Design in 2005 with additional studies at Rhode Island School of Design in USA.

Margrethe Odgaard Studio
Strandgade 75 C
3000 Elsinore, Denmark

Studio enquiries
hello@margretheodgaard.com

E-field, 2023

MO E-F 23

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E-field is an open series of textile works in which Odgaard uses layers of transparent silk organza in order to materialize colour.

The silk is printed with reactive dyestoff in coloured fields and pinned at the top with nails, alowing for the sides of the organza to move freely. At the center of each layer, a fold draws the eye into the surface, creating an optic illusion of a colour graduation.

The layers of crisp, translucent silk organza seems to be illuminated by electricity, but the vibrancy is in fact light moving through relatively sheer textiles. Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell described light as a propagating wave of electric and magnetic fields in his formulation of electromagnetism from /> the 1860’s.

The three focus points at the top are the voltage centers of the electromagnetism. Short for Electric Field, the colours of E-field are materialized in the traveling of light through the layers of the material. This creates a sensation of moiré effect that serves to emphasize the feeling that the colour sparkles in the surface. Furthermore, static electricity occurs from time to time in the meeting between the silk organza and the acrylic glass, which makes the textile electric and alive.

According to Margrethe Odgaard, the experience of colour is not static but rather a fleeting result of the meeting between material and light, or a sensory illusion that we might try to maintain, as one captures the beauty of a butterfly by pinning it down.