Glass art

Glass sculpture at Kew Gardens.

Crown Fountain is composed of glass brick towers.

Glass art is usually understood to refer to large modern works of art, typically one-off creations, which are substantially or wholly made in glass. It is distinguished from "art glass" and "studio glass" which are typically smaller and often made in editions of many identical pieces, but the boundaries are not clear-cut. Glass art is more likely to be exhibited in public spaces rather than in homes.

Glass panels

Artistically decorated, individually commissioned, large glass panels are usually for interior use, often in hotels, cruise liners and restaurants or night clubs. The decorative techniques used would include wheel carving, engraving, frosting, acid-etching, enamelling and gilding (including Angel gilding), often combining techniques by the use of masking or silkscreening.

Glass Art installations

A very large artwork consisting of several sections to make up the whole.

Example:

• "La Cascade" (1991), Steve Tobin

A huge installation measuring 20x20x80 feet made up of glass capillary tubes. The work was shown at L’Espace Duchamp Villon, Rouen, France.

• "Chronos Trilogy" (1998), Warren Carther

A suite of three large scale sculptures in Lincoln House office tower, Hong Kong, by Warren Carther, Canadian Architectural Glass Artist. At twenty five tons, and collectively spanning over 50 meters the immense pieces of the trilogy each represent a particular facet of time: the past, the present, and the future.

• "Noel Judicial Complex Project" (2010), Paul Housberg

Inspired by the architecture and its references to water and wetlands, this kilnformed art glass has both color and texture. It consists of four screens, one for each floor and representative of the different seasons.

• "Pack Ice / Mirror of the Sea" (Ahtojää / Meren peili; 1967/1987), Timo Sarpaneva, Finland's largest glass art object

Nordic art specialists often compared the capacity of Sarpaneva's work in glass to capture light along with its hues to looking through ice beneath the sea. "Pack Ice / Mirror of the Sea" has been installed in the entrance lobby of the KoskiKeskus shopping mall in downtown Tampere since March 1988. The 36x21 ft. (12x6.4 m) mirror-paneled triangle, suspended from the ceiling, is filled with 488, up to 1 m (3.3 ft.) high, faceted and noduled glass turrets. A meditation on fluidity and the cycle of life, it also subsumes a Finnish take on the two manifestations of the country's denotative multitude of lakes – white ice in the winter and a blue mirror in the summer.

Glass sculpture

Statuesque or monumental one-off glass sculptures, such as those by Livio Seguso and the partnership of Stanislav Libenský and Jaroslava Brychtová come under "Glass art". So too, one-off pieces whose design is so avant-garde that they become "art" first and the material glass, while integral to the construction or form, is a secondary consideration. A good example of this is René Roubícek's "Object" 1960, a blown and hot-worked piece of 52.2 cm shown at the "Design in an Age of Adversity" exhibition at the Corning Museum of Glass in 2005.

Smaller glass sculptures, produced in limited numbers, such as the Lampwork figures of Stanislav Brychta are examples of Art glass.

Glass in Art

This related term covers artworks which include glass elements but are not substantially made from glass.

See also

• Studio glass
• Factory Glass