Signed IHK (Ingrid Hellman Knafve)

The rugs of Ingrid Hellman-Knafve seem, like her husband’s paintings, very much shaped by the colors and landscape forms she saw around her in rural Sweden.

Ingrid grew up near the important textile city of Kinna, inland and south-east of Gothenburg. She studied to be a crafts teacher but seems to have fairly rapidly outgrown the teaching profession. Within 5 years, she had started a weaving studio on her family’s property called Stenhall in the town of Örby. It grew to be a prosperous operation with Ingrid, employing many women from the area as weavers. She seems to have particularly liked designing large pile rugs.

In 1948, Hellman married another artist, Nils Folke Knafve, and together they created a summer house on property owned by his family in Nyhamnsläge on the Kullen peninsula, on Sweden’s southwest coast. This was an area populated by artists—potters, painters, and weavers

Ingrid began to show her work more widely. For a museum exhibition in Zurich in 1949, Ingrid was in good company. The list of other other textile participants includes a number of important and highly regarded rug designers, both older and contemporary, Estrid Ericson, Josef Frank, Greta Gahn, Alice Lund, Tyra Lundgren, Edna Martin, Alf Munthe, Marianne Richter, and Sofia Widen.

After a study year in Paris in 1951-2, likely with her husband, Hellman-Knafe came back to Stenhall and embarked on a career of extensive rug design and production which continued into the 1980s.The last phase of her design career seems to have been designing rugs on commission for Swedish official residences.