“If you want breakfast in bed, sleep in the kitchen.” Is it a print from Ikea, or the slogan on a beer koozie that you bought at a truck stop?
(Answer: It’s an Ikea poster.)
While Ikea’s budget prints currently leave a lot to be desired, that’s soon to change. The Scandinavian furniture giant has signed a deal with camera manufacturer Hasselblad, to feature eight new prints by the company’s elite photographer pool. The new collection will feature both portraits and natural landscapes by Dmitry Ageev, Lars van de Goor, Hans Strand, Bára Prášilová, Ali Rajabi, Tom D. Jones, and Joachim Schmeisser.
If you haven’t perused the $4 posters from Ikea recently, they really have gotten quite bad. While my mind’s eye had remembered seeing Matisse prints in those art bins near checkout, current selections range from Cafepress-style slogan prints, to generic iStock photo-looking stuff you might see inside a soulless Airbnb, to some fairly hideous cartoon characters.
In other words, an ethereal wooded landscape by Lars van de Goor–whose tiniest prints start at $150 on his site–is a significant upgrade, especially since Ikea prints start at $4 and generally top out at about $40. Ikea is really a company about the mass manufacture of decent aesthetics, and that should obviously include our walls, too. Read more