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Interior designer
Elina Amann, last edited on 14.10.2022
Name:
Malle Agabush (also: Malle Jamieson-Agabuš)
Life Dates:
1948 – 2012
Country:
Employers:
Furniture production company Standard (1973-1977)
Kooperaator production company (1977-1982)
ETK Project (Tallinn branch of the design institute Tsentrosojuzprojekt) (1988-1989)
State Art Institute of the Estonian SSR (Lecturer, from 1976)
Field of expertise:
Interior design
Education:
Estonian interior designer Malle Agabush was born in Tallinn on 9 September 1948. She focused on interior and furniture design during her studies. She graduated from the Estonian State Institute of Arts (today: Estonian Academy of Arts) in 1973.
After her studies, Agabush began working for companies that made furniture. First, from 1973 to 1977, at the furniture production company Standard, and then, until 1982, at the production company Kooperaator. At the same time, when she started her second job, Agabush was also a lecturer at her former art school. Like architect and colleague Mai Shein, the interior designer worked at the Tallinn branch of the design company Tsentrosojuzprojekt from 1988 to 1989. A year later, she attained the title of professor.
Agabush, who specialised in interior architecture and furniture design, also worked and trained professionally in Hungary and Sweden, in addition to Estonia. As a lecturer, she connected her students with those of a Swedish university by presenting teaching videos of their work.
After Estonia’s independence, she founded the Free Association of Estonian Interior Design.
She presented her furniture pieces in exhibitions in Tallinn and titled them “Space and Form” (1976 and 1984) or “Time and Place” (1986). Parts of her collections of serial furniture were defined as significant for the Soviet period. The Estonian art critic Karin Paulus described a sofa (“Eva”) designed by Agabush as a “symbol of Soviet comfort” and a number of pieces of furniture as “post-modernist individual pieces of furniture”, while examining the furniture at an exhibition in 1999.
Today, her works are in the collections of the Estonian Museum of Architecture and the Estonian Museum of Applied Art and Design.
A later addition to Agabush’s speciality was designing the interiors of public institutions. Her works include the interior of Galeria Molen in 1991 or the interiors of Tallinn Central Library from 2000 to 2002.
Main image: By Jaan Künnap – Jaan Künnap, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=69312329 (last accessed 14.10.2022)
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