In 2010, Oiva Toikka (born 1931) is celebrating his 50-year career as a designer with Iittala. In honour of the event, Design Museum is staging a major Oiva Toikka retrospective as its summer exhibition of 2010.

In Finnish design, Oiva Toikka is known for his joyful approach and as an individualist, whose colourful and rich idiom of form has found admirers in large numbers both in Finland and abroad. Toikka is a perennial seeker and experimenter. He began his professional association with the Arabia factory and its Art Department in 1956–1959 with stylized animal figurines. In 1963, Oiva Toikka began his work in glass design at Nuutajärvi, which has continued to the present day. Alongside ceramics and glass, Toikka has designed textiles, opera sets and costumes, and plastic objects, among other work.

This exhibition presents Toikka's wide-ranging oeuvre from his early ceramic sculpture of the 1950s to his contemporary works in glass and plastics. The exhibits include his popular collections of glassware, his bird figures sought after by collectors, and magnificent one-off works. The exhibition is a journey of experiences into Oiva Toikka's colourful world of fairy tale.

Oiva Toikka's fairy-tale world is also available in book form and on the Internet. A book on Toikka's artworks and designed products will appear in connection with the exhibition. The contributors are Jennifer Opie, who is an expert in ceramics and glass of the Victoria & Albert Museum, Kaisa Koivisto PhD, and Museum Director Marianne Aav. The book also contains an interview with theatre director Lisbeth Landefort, and an illustrated chronological index of mass-produced items designed by Oiva Toikka. The book will be available at the press conference.

Design Museum's web-based exhibition on Toikka's extensive output will be opened to the public together with the museum exhibition. The web exhibition can be seen at Design Museum and at https://toikka.kokoelma.fi. on the Internet. In honour of the summer exhibition, Oiva Toikka designed a mug for the occasion. The new red Birds mug is sold exclusively in Design Museum’s Shop.

The exhibition is open until 19 September, at Design Museo, Helsinki