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

With Some Defined Measure, 2020

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The series With Some Defined Measure is a central work in my journey towards investigating the effect of colour as the 4th dimension of the cube rather than simply seeing colour as decoration on the surface.

Colour is fleeing by nature and difficult to control in the material because it changes with the surface and light source. But what happens if we try to put the effect of colour on formula? Does the effect of colour shift from the emotional hemisphere to the logical?

The equation was developed by a (friendly) American professor of mathematics based on Margrethe Odgaard’s outlays. The equation is an interesting picture of the opposition between the logical and the intuitively comprehensible. To the attentive eye, the equation contains the phrase with some defined measure, which means that there is an unknown in the equation that can never be defined. Therefore, the equation cannot be used as a mathematical equation. But why is the equation so interesting? Because simply by trying to consider the effect of the colour in a logical and less emotional way, the perception of the colour and thus the understanding of the colour is shifted.

Mashine embroidery on Atlas upholstery fabric designed for Kvadrat

First exhibited in Margrethe Odgaard’s solo exhibition Think, Dream, Imagine, Colour at Willumsens Museum (DK), 2020