Glass is so much a part of our everyday lives that we scarcely notice it while reading the time, waiting for a traffic light, or pouring a drink. Every day we generally see and touch hundreds of pieces of glass - windows in buildings and automobiles, plates, TV screens, jars, cooking utensils, eyeglass. It is used so extensively in our technological age that we've been conditioned to overlook it.
A group of artists today, however, are reinvesting glass with the fascination and mystery it had for the early Romans or the Christian artisans who glazed the windows of vast cathedrals in medieval times. Their works, rather than focusing on technological advances which have made glass "invisible" to us, make the viewers aware of its unique and often sensuous qualities.
Two recent exhibitions in California have successfully documented the current renaissance in glass art which is taking place both in the United States and abroad. The Downey Museum of Art in southern California sponsored a Glass Art National (March 27-May 9), and the Oakland Museum in the northern part of the state is currently showing, through part of the state is currently showing, through August 24, Contemporary American and European Glass from the collection of Bay Area collectors George and Dorothy Saxe. Taken as a pair, these exhibitions provide interesting insights into some of the reasons glass, as a medium for artistic expression, has begun to attract so much attention.
Objects selected for the Downey Glass Art National were juried from slides submitted by artists through out the United States as well as Canada and Mexico. From the 601 slides entered by 178 artists, 36 objects made by 25 artists were included in the exhibition. An added highlight to the exhibition was a gallery filled with crystal sculptures by three of Steuben Glass' foremost designers - Peter Aldridge, David Dowler, and Eric Hilton. The diversity of the objects displayed gives testimony to the highly imaginative and experimental nature of the new glass art on the one hand, and its debt to tradition on the other.
Visitors to the Downey Museum were greeted by a broad assortment of works. While the predominant expressive mode consisted of small-scale sculptural pieces, many examples of other types of work balanced out the exhibition. Conventional forms such as vessels, plates, and paperweights were juxtaposed with such unorthodox glass objects as masks, drawings, and even a luminous tapestry woven with neon tubing.
To someone unfamiliar with contemporary glass art, the Downey show was certainly filled with surprises. The mass-produced decorative glass objects, which many of us own or have seen in museums or books, are quite different in nature from the one-of-a-kind pieces in the Glass Art National. What sets the Downey works apart from mass-produced objects is that each of them was designed and fabricated by the artists, most often in his or her own studio. This is no small feat, given the experience, the complex technical knowledge, and the sheer physical endurance that are prerequisites for working successfully with molten glass.
Prominent glass artists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries such as Lalique, Galle, or Tiffany designed works which were subsequently executed by the master artisans they employed. Rarely did the designer handle a blow-pipe or actually
...
Read Full Article
|
