Kay Bojesen

Kay Bojesen

Kay Bojesen was born in 1886 as the son of a publishing director and an artist in Copenhagen, parents who encouraged him to think imaginatively at an early age. Following the completion of an apprenticeship with the silversmith icon Georg Jensen, Bojesen earned a good reputation for his interior design work. As one of the first artisans in Denmark to be inspired by functionalism, Kay Bojesen created objects that have been used for decades. He was one of the initiators of the association "Den Permanente" ("The Resistant"), who organised regular exhibitions that presented the highlights of contemporary Scandinavian design. Kay Bojesen's great love of woodwork finally led him to design life-like wooden animals with button eyes, which were created between 1930 and 1957 in a small workshop with a shop at Bredgade 47 in the heart of Copenhagen, and which gained world-wide fame. Inspired by nature, Bojesen never pursued the claim to create lifelike figures, he however succeeded in impressively breathing life into his creatures and giving them a friendly mind - true to the motto that good design should be human, warm and alive. Today, the imaginative Kaj Bojesen wooden figures are Scandinavian design classics and are produced by Rosendahl in close cooperation with the grandchildren of Kay Bojesen. Appealing for young and old, the high-quality figures, such as the Kaj Bojesen monkey, zebra and lovebirds, can be handed down from generation to generation and achieve what they were created for: to awaken the child in all of us.