Overview
Early modernist glass vase from the GN3 series designed by Gunnel Nyman, one of the first internationally recognized Finnish women designers. Produced at Nuutajärvi glassworks in the late 1940s–early 1950s. Hand-blown clear glass with controlled air bubbles forming a dense, rhythmic pattern throughout the body.
Design & Technique
The vase is made using a controlled bubble technique, where air bubbles are deliberately trapped within the glass structure. The bubbles vary slightly in size and spacing, creating a vibrating surface that reacts strongly to light. When viewed from different angles, the dots appear to shift, forming spiral and wave-like movements inside the vessel.
The form is compact and slightly tapered, with a thick base and a gently flared rim. The silhouette remains simple, allowing the internal structure of bubbles to define the visual impact.
Visual Character
The composition recalls natural phenomena: underwater currents, mineral inclusions, or a field of rising air in clear water. Light passes through the glass unevenly, producing depth and optical distortion. The effect is both graphic and sculptural, typical of Nyman’s early experimental period.
Dating
This vase dates to approximately 1947–1954, corresponding to the GN3 series production.
Dimensions
Condition
Very good vintage condition. Minor traces of age are present and consistent with the period. One tiny inclusion, few light scratches, please, refer to the photos.
Why buy vintage glass by Gunnel Nyman?
Female designer Gunnel Nyman secured her place in design history by inventing modern glass and crystal design in the 1940s, which would come to be known as modernist in the 1950s.
Her vases and bowls, with their new fluid forms and techniques of decorating with microbubbles that revealed the full beauty of glass, became a sensation in the late 1940s.
Gunnel was called a designer-poet. The main focus in creating objects for her was the harmony of material, form, and proportions, with the material always remaining dominant. Shortly before her death, the designer wrote that the ideal object should be such that it would be unimaginable to conceive it made from anything other than glass or crystal.
"Glass can be called a 'solid liquid,' and the nature of solidified water, its living transparency, is perhaps the most beautiful property of this wonderful substance," Nyman noted.
Gunnel Nyman's pieces have become iconic and are valued worldwide.
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