Ahead of Stockholm Design Week 2020, the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts opens the exhibition Room Pictures Stripes with newly produced and previously never-before-seen works by two of the country's most renowned textile designers – Ingela Håkansson Lamm and Tom Hedqvist. The exhibition runs from February 1 to March 1, 2020.

The exhibition shows rooms, images and stripes in their broadest and perhaps most concentrated forms, which despite seemingly different expressions are united by Ingela Håkansson Lamm and Tom Hedqvist's common denominator as designers, pattern designers and colleagues for half a century.

In two rooms, Ingela Håkansson Lamm shows a colorful, symbol-laden imagery that moves freely between the figurative and the graphically abstract. In a number of spatial installations from her home in Stockholm in the 1960s, parts of a pop cultural all-art work are recreated for her own living space, with textiles, photography and everyday objects. For the first time, a large number of hand-printed textile images and patterns, created during her years of study at Konstfack, which marked the beginning of Håkansson Lamm's long career as a designer.

“I have always been fascinated by what is odd and does not follow common norms, an approach to form that I not only began to practice through my textiles in the 1960s, but also physically built rooms from and lived in, and which I have now recreated with a light hand in the exhibition,” says Ingela Håkansson Lamm.

In the adjacent room, Tom Hedqvist is showing a series of newly produced motifs on the theme of stripes, a graphic language that many have learned to associate with him, both as a textile and graphic designer.

Through measurements in the exhibition hall, Hedqvist has found the proportions for a classic block stripe that has become the basic building block for all the stripes on display. Tom Hedqvist's installation is also a personal homage to his friend and designer Inez Svensson.

"The idea has been to take a step back and design as little as possible, to let the stripes rather design themselves. The novelty value is not important to me, on the contrary, I am interested in the recognition itself, in the seemingly trivial and how it affects us," says Tom Hedqvist.

In conjunction with the exhibition, a paperback catalogue will be published with a foreword by Isabella Nilsson, Permanent Secretary at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts, an essay by Clemens Poellinger and interviews with the designers by Gustaf Kjellin.