Sune Riishede reveals the story behind Claus Bolby's spectacular 1960s acrylic art lamps

Claus Bolby was born in 1944 and began his career as a technician in the Royal Danish Airforce. In his free time, meanwhile, he pursued a broad range of creative arts, including painting and working with wood and other materials. These mixed media activities brought Bolby into lighting design, and he won a commission to produce pendant lighting for a newly built and strikingly modern church in Strandby, northern Jutland.

The lights were designed to symbolise a Danish priest's collar (praestekrave), with acrylic staves (lamellaes) radiating from a metal tube, and the light-spreading faculty of the clear acrylic meant that light beamed outwards along the staves. Using acrylic of various colours, Bolby subsequently created a smaller version of the same light for use in private homes (see the blue example above right). He started producing the lights in the basement of his home in Silkeborg, and recruited shops to sell them under the title Symfoni. This was in 1967 when he was 23 years old, and he continued to produce variations on the Symfoni for the next ten years (the red example, left, being one of the last).

Meanwhile in the late 1960s, with his cellar converted into an alchemist's workshop, Bolby performed all kinds of chemical experiments with the acrylic staves left over from Symfoni production. He started to use them for reliefs and collages in a style that emerged partly from the fact that the acrylic plates were sawn along straight lines into rectangular shapes, but was also reminiscent of forms found in his paintings of that period. He used chemical processes and heating to make the staves rounded and smooth, and melted them together.

Another technique Bolby created was to introduce bubbles into the acrylic, which had the effect of giving it an inner life, and his preference for using acrylic in yellows, oranges and reddish colours gave it an amber-like look. When the finished artwork elements were applied to wall lamps and ceiling lights, and light shone through from behind these acrylic faces, a warm fire-like glow emerged which had widespread appeal, especially to a Danish audience with a tradition of creating an atmosphere of cosy dimmed light in the home – the concept of hygge.

In 1968 Bolby was ready to start production on his first completely original lamp design, a bubbly amber-coloured cubistic relief named Vega (see right). This was the start of a busy time during which more production space was rented and the first employees were hired. The small lighting factory now called itself Cebo Industri, and Bolby's next lamp models weren't given names, just numbers, perhaps reflecting how fast the project moved.

In 1969 the prominent Danish lighting company Lyskjaer Belysning took over the distribution of the increasingly popular hygge lamps, mainly within Denmark. In the early 1970s Lyskjaer would order a thousand pieces a month of the most popular models. In 1974 Cebo Industri moved into a larger factory in Silkeborg, with showroom and the whole production process under one roof.

In the late 70s the ten-year cycle of demand for the colourful acrylic lights ended abruptly as fashions in interior design moved into the monochrome 80s. By this time Claus Bolby had already started to design technical lights and spotlights, so the factory and its people (who came to number as many as 30) were kept in work for many years to follow. Production was sold in 1995 and eventually phased out a few years later.

Today Claus Bolby lives with his wife in the house where it all started, and is back in the basement doing experiments with lights – now producing mobile lights for people with visual disabilities and electronic counters. He enjoys being reminded of that special time in the 60s and 70s, ten years of high inspiration and full creativity. Until recently the acrylic lights had been forgotten, but they are now receiving new attention both in Denmark and internationally for their artistic form and originality – and the hygge glow in the dark.

This article by Sune Riishede was based on an interview with Claus Bolby and is reproduced by classic modern with the kind permission of both parties.

See also

Claus Bolby acrylic wall lights at classic modern

More classic modern spotlight profiles of designers and manufacturers

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