Timo Sarpaneva - Biography - Employ

Employ

Sarpaneva graduated from the Institute for Industrial Arts (the forerunner of the University of Arts and Design) in Helsinki in 1948 and received a PhD later. Shortly after he began to work with glass, he won the Iittala competition in engraved glass and was hired by the company in 1951 (other sources mention the previous year) as a designer and director of exhibitions. He won his first Grand Prix at the 1954 Milan Triennale for his clear glass series, which also went to his already well-established colleague at Iittala, Tapio Wirkkala. In 1956, Sarpaneva embraced colored glass as he developed Iittala's new upscale i-linija (i-line) series of plates, bottles, and other objects. Radical for that time, his involvement extended to the design of the packaging and of Iittala's name with a prominent, white, lower-case letter i in a red circle as the new line's trademark, which the company then adopted as its universal logo through the 21st century. i-linija won him his second Grand Prix at the 1957 Milan Triennale, where he also received a Grand Prix for his design of the Finnish exhibition.

In the meantime, he worked on his English at the newly opened Helsinki branch of Berlitz International in the second half of the 1950s, soon began to teach at his alma mater, including a course in linoleum block printing for students of textile design, and became full professor in 1976. Having already worked for the textiles association PMK in the 1950s (and planned an eventually canceled 1957 Triennale garment show for Marimekko in an early recognition that ready-made fashion was beginning to be appreciated as an industrial art), he continued in the 1960s with cloth designs for Tampella and acted as an artistic director for the Swedish textile company Kinnasand between 1964 and 1972, after which he started his association with the German porcelain producer Rosenthal. He commuted between Helsinki and Murano (Venice, Italy) for six years in the 1990s, making mostly sculptures with the Venini glassmakers and the renowned craftsman Pino Signoretto. All along, despite a hiatus in the 1970s when Iittala sought to cancel some of its glass production techniques, Sarpaneva maintained a creative relationship with his first employer for most of his productive life. He was survived by his four adult children and his wife of nine years, Marjatta née Svennevig, whom he married at Helsinki Cathedral in 1997 after 30 years of living together and who designed his tombstone at the Hietaniemi Cemetery, now closed to further burials, the last resting place of numerous people influential in Finnish history, politics, and culture.