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FAD Magazine covers contemporary art – News, Exhibitions and Interviews reported on from London

Art of Glass

The old distinctions between ‘art’ and ‘craft’ have reduced sufficiently in recent years that ceramics and textiles can now be regarded as mainstream: one indicator of that is the publication by Thames & Hudson of Vitamin C (100 contemporary clay and ceramic artists, 2017) and Vitamin T (100 contemporary thread and textile artists, 2019). I’m not aware that Vitamin G is on the way, but it would make sense if work in glass were comparably recognised. I was reminded of that at the V&A recently, where the collections of glass are spectacular. Here are some examples: as Blondie nearly sang, ‘Soon turned out had an art of glass’:

Markku Salo: ‘Animal’, 1996 (top): a glass bottle blown into a wire cage at the Nuutajärvi glassworks in Finland makes for a witty interface between categories, with the tradition of ships in bottles in play as well as a functional vessel and the eponymous zoomorphism.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Toots Zynsky: Dondolante Serena, 2000 . On the one hand a potentially functional vase, on the other hand pretty much a thirty-layer painting by the American Mary Ann ‘Toots’ Zynsky. She’s known for developing the filet-de-verre technique, in which she layers thousands of multicoloured glass threads, fuses them in the kiln, then reaches in with heat-resistant gloves to shape the glass.

 

Tali Dalton: ‘Under My Wing’, 2006, British-born, Australian-based Tali Dalton suggests smooth and rough snakes – and, by implication, the variable friction in a relationship – through these intertwining forms in brown glass, one with wheel-cut surface decoration.

 

Stanislav Libensky and Jaroslava Brychtová: Winged Creature I, 1962. This mould-melted red glass, in the shape of a rectangular head-come-animal form, reminds me a little of Lynn Chadwick’s sculptures from around the same time. It was made in the Zelezny Brod glassworks, the then-nationalised amalgamation of nine factories in the small town at the centre of the Czech glass industry.

 

Art writer and curator Paul Carey-Kent sees a lot of shows: we asked him to jot down whatever came into his head

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