Margrethe Odgaard

Textile and colour designer Margrethe Odgaard works with colour as a full, sensory perception. With her intense focus on the interaction of colour, material and light, she aims to become clearer about how we as humans experience and emotionally connect with the world around us.

Odgaard shares her time equally between commercial collaborations and an artistic practice based on self-initiated research. On her client list are companies as Kvadrat, Muuto, Montana, HAY, and IKEA, and her exhibition catalogue includes solo exhibitions at Willumsen’s Museum (DK), Röhsska Museum (SE), Designmuseo Helsinki (FI), and Munkeruphus (DK).

In 2015 she received the Three-year work grant from The Danish Arts Foundation and in 2016 she was awarded the prestigious Torsten and Wanja Söderberg Award (SE).

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