Born in Copenhagen, Mathias Bengtsson studied furniture design at the Danish College of Design and the Art Centre College in Switzerland. In 1996, he moved to London at the urging of his hero, legendary designer Verner Panton, where he studied furniture and product design with Ron Arad at the Royal College of Art. Bengtsson graduated from the RCA in 1999, a year after Panton’s death, with a final project that paid homage to the iconic Panton chair. The project also served as a prototype for Bengtsson’s successful Slice Chair (1998), made of digitally sliced plywood stacked and glued into its final form. This chair was the birth of what would become Bengtsson’s approach to design, combining technology and craft in the pursuit of the unimaginable.

Bengtsson founded his own studio in 2002 and that same year his work was shown in the Design by Aluminum exhibition at the Design Museum, London and international acclaim for his creations only grew from there. Bengtsson experiments with the sculptural, technological, and philosophical potential of 3D design by working with numerous materials and industrial methods. The majority of his works are one-of-a-kind or limited editions that necessitate cutting-edge production techniques and time-consuming fabrication methods. His designs have been exhibited extensively in both fine art and design contexts and can already be found in numerous permanent collections worldwide including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and the Manchester Art Gallery. Today, Bengtsson lives and works in London where he shares a studio with his wife, graphic designer Sara Hildén Bengtsson.