The Heart of Glass

The crumpled vessels that Jeff Zimmerman makes in glass are mysterious objects. Mirrorised, opaque or crystal clear, in each one he pushes the fluid nature of his chosen material to its absolute limits. For Zimmerman, though, they are not really about glass at all. He is a conceptualist, simply using glass to ruminate on the individuality and imperfections of the natural world.

“Could you actually use them, put something in them?” I ask his gallerist Zesty Meyers, the co-founder of R & Company, himself a former glass artist. “You could,” says Meyers. “But you wouldn’t. They are studies, they’re drawings. They are also exceeding what you think are the limits of the material.”

Glass-making is an ancient practice – the technique is at least 4,000-years-old. And yet it has never ceased to invite experimentation and reinterpretation. “Over the years I’ve seen changes both within the community of glass makers as well as with collectors,” says Douglas Heller, who has run his eponymous gallery since 1973. “Right now the design world is especially interested in glass. Designers such as Lindsey Adelman, Harry Allen, Ron Arad and Jorge Pardo use it to great effect in lighting and other projects. Glass is a challenging, even humbling, material to work with. But for some, the allure of this supercooled non-crystalline substance is irresistible.”

Others, like the highly skilled blower Bjørn Friborg, take an iconoclastic approach to the process of making. To make his powerful

Implosion works, Friborg punches into the blown form while it is still hot, creating a sense of extreme movement. “It’s a whole new technique,” says Juliet Burrows, co-founder of New York gallery Hostler Burrows, which represents the artist. “And it’s all very rock ’n’ roll. He sometimes wears a boxing glove to do it.”

Burrows remarks on the increasing interest in glass among those who collect contemporary art, though it doesn’t have to be contemporary glass. Sara Blumberg and Jim Oliveira established Glass Past in 1995, specializing in Italian pieces made between 1870 and 1970. “I think we were really drawn to the mystery of accomplishment,” Blumberg says. “It’s such a few basic elements, and yet produces these beautiful objects.”

“Museums with an interest in contemporary studio glass have increased dramatically. The Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk VA and the Flint Institute of Art in Michigan include glass making studios as part of their facilities,” says Heller. “The exposure these institutions offer helps ignite public interest and expands audiences.”

Rare works, such as the complex Mosaic vases created by Ercole Barovier in the 1920s, now change hands for $200,000–300,000. “They mostly go to private collections,” says Blumberg. On occasion the same prices can apply to more recent works. Those by Yoichi Ohira – who started as a fashion designer before creating works in Murano glass that are a dazzling blend of Japanese restraint and Venetian mastery – can reach $500,000 or more at auction. “There are only about 600 pieces,” says gallerist Pierre-Marie Giraud. “People really fight to get their hands on one.”

Blumberg’s personal favourites are the opaque vases made by Italian architect Carlo Scarpa during his brief spell at manufacturer M.V.M. Cappellin & Co in the 1920s. “We usually think about transparency,” she says. “But he highlighted the surface using gold leaf, or the corroso technique.” (The latter creates a stone-like finish.)

It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that she has works by the wunderkind Thaddeus Wolfe in her own collection – a practitioner who has entirely reversed the transparent qualities of glass for his architectural Assemblage works made of stacked component parts. Wolfe blows into polystyrene foam or plaster moulds, then works the material when it’s cold. Sometimes he adds color with thin rods of pigmented glass. ”It’s hard to even tell that it’s glass,” says Carole Hochman, a director at Friedman Benda, who will show Wolfe’s work at Salon. “It’s carved and polished, and at times quite wacky. Equally it’s very thoughtful and painterly work.”

But what defines glass for many is its liquidity, and its ability to create the interaction of light and color. For that, the simplest forms of the material deliver pure delight. In the hands of Londonbased Jochen Holz, off-the-peg tubes of richly colored glass are transformed into vessels that he describes as “between figuration and abstraction”, as well as jewellery and lighting. His latest series is La Belle et la Bête – named for the surreal scene in Jean Cocteau’s 1946 film where arms holding candelabra suddenly appear through the walls of a corridor. The first piece, a chandelier, was launched at London gallery FUMI this year: an artful mass of clear glass tubes, bent, wiggled and bound together with delicate steel ties. It is another joyous experiment in the many things that glass can do.