Vibeke Fonnesberg Schmidt

Background

Vibeke Fonnesberg Schmidt studied ceramics in Japan, then earned a ceramics degree with the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, and studied at the Glasgow School of Art. She graduated from the Danish Design School in 1994 and worked for years with unique ceramic pieces, exhibiting widely. Since 2012 she has focused on lighting, and she hand-builds her lamps in her own studio in Copenhagen.

Signature Style

Geometry is always her starting point, and she says she loves circles. She translates geometric shapes into complex, organic lamp compositions of transparent and opalised plexiglass held together with brass fittings, and her lamps carry reminiscences of 1960s Italian design, French Art Nouveau and German Bauhaus modernism. Her work is methodical and system-driven: repetition, spatial dimensions and symmetries break down, shift and displace to form new constellations.

Notable Works

Her designs include the custom series Diciotto, Stafa, Stilla, Ivalo, Onda, Aino and Tern, and the one-off Love Lights. Coppia, a table lamp made in 2024 for Gubi, joins stainless steel and plexiglass in two sets of discs. For Normann Copenhagen she designed the Bau lamp, listed in Large and Small. Nilufar Open Edition took over production of three of her series and the VILI carpet in 2022.

Legacy

Her lamps have been shown at the Danish Design Museum, Trapholt Museum, Rörstrand Museum, the Danish Architecture Center and Kunsthal Charlottenborg. Among the collections that hold her work are those of the Danish Design Museum, Trapholt Museum, the CLAY Museum of Ceramic Art Denmark, the Danish Art Foundation and the New Carlsberg Foundation.