Kari Christensen was born in Kristiansand, Norway, in 1938. She trained at the national school of arts and crafts in Oslo and then went to Copenhagen, where she studied sculpture at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in the early 1960s.
While she was in Copenhagen she worked as a designer at Royal Copenhagen, on Tenera, the line of hand-painted faience that the factory's art director Nils Thorsson was running under the Aluminia name. Designers like Christensen drew the decoration and the factory's painters put it on each piece by hand, so no two pieces are quite the same.
Reading the marks
A pair of bowls we found in Cincinnati in September 2026 shows how a Tenera piece is signed. Each base carries her KC monogram, the factory's three-wave mark and the numbers 186/2196, along with the painter's initials. The initials are different on the two bowls, which is what you would expect from a genuine pair, painted from one design by two different hands.
After Royal Copenhagen
Christensen went back to Norway and in 1966 set up her own workshop in Oslo, working in stoneware and porcelain. In 1971 she won a gold medal at an international ceramics biennale in Italy, and in 1982 she won the commission for Kilden, a public work for the police headquarters in Oslo. The National Museum in Oslo holds her work from the 1970s and 1980s, including thrown stoneware bowls with hand-painted decoration. She died in 1997.
