Latchezar Boyadjiev: Monochromatically Modern

Franklin Park Conservatory Opens FIORI: A Chihuly Garden of Glass

NY Times Reviews Toledo Museum of Art's new Glass Pavillion

Hawk Galleries featuring Albert Paley and Christopher Ries at SOFA Chicago 2006

Preview working studio shots of Albert Paley’s new Animal Series, for SOFA Chicago, Nov. 10-12

Beautiful works by four sculptors demonstrate versatility of fragile medium

Sunday, March 30, 2008

By Jacqueline Hall (FOR THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH)

Hawk Galleries' "Les Dames de Verre (Women of Glass)" presents the intriguing works of four artists who approach the medium in different ways. And none favors the glass-blowing technique that produces objects of great brilliance, transparency, translucency and color. Rather, the women concentrate on the medium's expressive potential and versatility.

Transverse

A favored technique is casting, or pouring molten glass into a mold before the work is fired in a kiln. The most traditional approach is that of Robin Grebe, a former instructor at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her figurative sculptures deal with human emotions and conflicts. Her self-portrait, Quiet Journey, presents two figures peacefully resting on a choppy sea and serves as a metaphor for the endurance of life. Transverse, a sculpture in the shape of a boat with a reclining figure on top, carries a cleverly painted landscape that alludes to the environment and humanity's relationship with nature.

Fumarole

Adrianne Evans, who teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design, approaches casting differently. She combines glass dust with water and pours the mixture layer upon layer, allowing it to settle to the bottom like sediment in a riverbed. She then puts the wet slab into a mold and fires it in the kiln. Her sculptures have a geological quality. Fumarole, inspired by volcanic areas, looks like an old tower and seems to be made of clay rather than fused-glass sediment. Slab exhibits the fluidity of melted rock issuing from a volcano.

Artists Mary Van Cline and Cassandria Blackmore, both from Seattle, produce works as original as those of the East Coast artists.

Woman With Red Leaves

In The Passage of Time, Van Cline mixes cast glass and photography. In the three-dimensional-looking Woman With Red Leaves, the leaves are so realistic that they show the destruction caused by bugs and time.

Being Koi

The unconventional Blackmore, using glass as a canvas, paints an image. Then she shatters the glass and, finally, puts it back together with grout between the pieces. The resulting work looks like a mosaic. Her painted images -- whether abstract, as Serenissima; or boldly figurative, as Being Koi -- are remarkably animated.

• "Les Dames de Verre (Women of Glass)" continues through April 27 in Hawk Galleries, 153 E. Main St.
1 to 5 p.m. Sundays, 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays.
Call 614-225-9595 or visit .

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Sculptor's unusual glass pieces use light to create illusions

Desert Flower

Sunday, December 2, 2007

By Jacqueline Hall (FOR THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH)

Few other artists dazzle the way Christopher Ries does with glass sculptures.

His recent works are on view in the Hawk Galleries exhibit "Guiding Light."

Ries, a former Columbus resident who lives in Pennsylvania, uses the purest optical crystal, which he calls the "quintessential medium for light," in a cold-glass technique -- rather than the hot-glass method favored by most other glass artists.

Instead of heating the glass, molding it and manipulating it, Ries casts the molten crystal in large forms, allows it to cool, then uses classic reductive methods to create forms.

He shapes, polishes and grinds the block of crystal so that it becomes a vehicle for penetrating light to create a fantastic, illusory world.

What appears inside the glass simply results from curves and facets on the outside that reflect back and forth within the crystal.

That illusory world seems to occupy a huge space out of proportion with the sculpture itself. In Desert Flower (above), for instance, the realistic flower looks ready to shatter the sides of its glass container.

Lotus

The large facets and sharp angles on the exterior of Lotus (above) create an ambiguous and tantalizing world of shifting planes and floating forms. As viewers move around the sculpture (or as the turntable on which it is placed spins), light penetrates the interior at different angles, creating abstract designs with irrepressible animation.

Wild Orchid

In Spring, a facet painted a delicate shade of blue-green creates unexpected areas of color at the top of the piece as well as at the base of the teardrop inside.

With two works, Harmony and Sonata, Ries departs dramatically from his usual approach, suggesting a new direction in his sculpting.

Harmony is made of two tall, rectangular pieces of optical crystal that have been cut, ground, polished and engraved. Instead of focusing visual interest on the interior of the glass, Ries has created a piece with light playing on its edges, calling to mind water gently flowing along the sides.

Sonata -- a huge, 700-pound circular piece of cobalt-blue optical crystal -- is polished and ground. The only surface interest is its heavy linear engraving. The sculpture is unusual yet beautiful.

• "Guiding Light" continues through Dec. 30 in Hawk Galleries, 153 E. Main St.
1 to 5 p.m. Sundays, 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays.
Call 614-225-9595 or visit .

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Sleek sculptures in glass glow with colorful intensity

December 2, 2006 – January 28, 2007

Jacqueline Hall (FOR THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH)

DURING THE MID-1990s, Latchezar Boyadjiev created sculpture with optical glass. Since then, the Bulgarian-born artist has dramatically changed his technique and style working in cast glass to create sensuous shapes. An exhibit of his richly colored, animated forms is on display at Hawk Galleries. Boyadjiev studied in Prague, Czechoslovakia, under the guidance of renowned glass artist Stanislav Libensky. He graduated from the Academy of Applied Arts there, then came to the United States. He lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area. His proximity to the ocean has influenced some of his recent imagery. Energy, a dark-blue piece with oceangreen edges, suggests a powerful wave or perhaps a monster from the deep. A similar edge is found in Independence, a honeybrown sculpture that captures the dynamism of the wind rather than the force of the ocean. But the dominant shape in Boyadjiev’s work is the human torso. It is strongly stylized but still sensuous in Woman and reduced to a minimum of lines and shapes in Vision. In his dramatic reduction of the torso, Boyadjiev calls to mind the sculpture of another eastern European, Romanian artist Constantin Brancusi, a dominant and influential artist of the art-deco period. What strikes viewers first in Boyadjiev’s work is color. Used monochromatically in each piece, it is handled so dramatically as to make each work memorable: cranberry red in Woman, bright green in Diversion and aquamarine in Torso. The use of color achieves superb feelings of volume and depth, giving animation to each piece — particularly noticeable in Vision. Boyadjiev attributes his ability to extensive training in sketching. Before beginning each piece, he creates numerous drawings in pencil and charcoal. Consequently, his sculptures seem to have two dimensions — a flat one that suggests a drawing in space and one that speaks volumes and depths, as in the remarkably simple Geometry II.

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Franklin Park Conservatory Opens FIORI: A Chihuly Garden of Glass

October 7, 2006 – February 25, 2007.

The dazzling art of Dale Chihuly returns to the Conservatory with a sculpture from his newest series of work - Fiori. From the Italian for “flowers,” this installation of his celebrated hand-blown glass shapes is reminiscent of a vibrant garden landscape. See this magnificent garden of glass and a stunning array of pieces from the Conservatory’s permanent Chihuly Collection, including a reinstallation of the spectacular red and yellow Sunset Tower. Go to www.fpconservatory.org/exhb_fiori.htm for more information, or call Hawk Galleries at 614-225-9595.

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Glass Pavilion: A Crystal Showcase Reflects a City’s Glass Legacy

By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
Standing in front of the new Glass Pavilion at the Toledo Museum of Art can reawaken that belief in the power of glass to enchant.

TOLEDO, Ohio — “Without a glass palace, life becomes a burden,” the poet Paul Scheerbart wrote nearly a century ago.

Standing in front of the new Glass Pavilion at the Toledo Museum of Art, designed by the Japanese team of Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, can reawaken that belief in the power of glass to enchant.

The pavilion, which houses the museum’s vast collection of glass artworks, is a testament to an earlier era when American industrial production and cultural growth were profoundly intertwined. Toledo was once a major center of glass production; now most of its factories are closed and the glass workers gone. The enormous sheets of glass needed for the pavilion were manufactured in Germany and molded in China in preparation for the Aug. 27 opening.

Yet this wholly contemporary building conjures up potent memories of the city’s history. Composed with exquisite delicacy, the pavilion’s elegant maze of curved glass walls represents the latest monument to evolve in a chain extending back to the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Its understated elegance recalls a time when investment in the public realm was still driven by civic pride rather than a lust for tourist dollars. The Glass Pavilion is part of a loosely knit complex that includes the Beaux-Arts-style art museum here and the University of Toledo’s Center for the Visual Arts, designed by Frank Gehry. With its grand staircase leading up to a row of Ionic columns, the original museum is both a temple to art and a monument to the belief in high culture’s ability to uplift the life of the worker.

The new structure’s low, horizontal form fits in this context with remarkable delicacy, as if the architects hesitated to disturb the surroundings. Seen from the museum steps, the pavilion’s reflective facade, surrounded by a soft carpet of glass, is barely visible beneath the shadowy canopies of ancient oak trees. Just beyond it is a row of stoic Victorian houses.

The closer you get, the more the building reveals. Its main entry is positioned off center, to line up exactly with the art museum’s grand stairway across the street. The pavilion’s cafe and a glass workshop extend out from there, punctuated by the intense orange glow of the glass furnaces. All this glass brings to mind Philip Johnson’s famous 1949 Glass House in New Canaan, Conn. Both facades dissolve into a collage of reflected and transparent images. Both structures rest on a thin base, firmly rooting them to the ground. In both cases the roof is a thin slab, as if it exists only to frame the view of the interior.

But Johnson’s masterpiece is the work of an exhibitionist. The facade acts as a picture frame, casting a visitor into the slightly creepy role of a peeping Tom. The first time I saw it, nearly two decades ago, I found myself hesitating uneasily as I approached the door. When Johnson’s hand gently pressed against my back, pushing me through, I felt like Alice falling through the looking glass.

By contrast the Glass Pavilion’s design is a diaphanous maze. The interior is a series of rounded glass rooms wrapped in a secondary glass skin, which creates a remarkably layered visual experience. From the lobby, for example, fragments of the landscaped lawn on the other side of the building are visible through a series of glass-walled galleries. Three simple interior courtyards, the largest with its windows hung in a gauzy curtain, separate these rooms, framing views of the sky and allowing light to spill down into the interiors.

The effect is hypnotic. And it is reinforced by the sinuous pattern of lines made by the walls meeting the ceiling, which draws you deeper into the spaces. Once inside the galleries, the eye is constantly slipping around curved surfaces before coming to rest on a particular view: a work of art, a tree in the landscape.

But it is the graceful interplay of human forms that gives the pavilion its enigmatic, ghostly quality. The double layer of glass sets up a delicious contrast between the stillness you experience inside the glass rooms and the more fluid interstitial spaces that separate them. As passing figures drift through these spaces, they seem to momentarily caress one another before pulling apart again where the walls curve to envelop the galleries.

At times the movements look ceremonial. As you watch, you become keenly aware of the different degrees of intimacy and isolation.

The art too looks good. Most in simple cabinets, the objects — elaborate chandeliers, Roman vases, a cast and gilded-glass Louis XIV mirror — seem to hover within the transparent spaces, allowing you to focus on individual pieces or uncover unexpected relationships among objects that are physically segregated in different galleries.

The architects, whose firm is known as Sanaa, designed two opaque galleries for more light-sensitive works. These solid white forms also serve to anchor a structure visually that might otherwise seem about to drift off into space.

That Sanaa could make all of this look so effortless is a sign of its mastery, and an illusion of course. To keep the roof so thin, for example, all of the major mechanical systems — heating, ventilation, plumbing — were buried in the basement or hidden in a nearby building. Pipes, wiring and air ducts were woven through the building’s structural beams as precisely as wires laid into a computer board. A loading dock was buried underground so that it would not detract from the purity of the facade.

The building hides a complex ecological organism, divided into three independent climate zones. A radiant heating-and-cooling system inside the interstitial cavities is used to control the climate in the public areas and to prevent condensation on the glass. The “hot shop” — where visiting artists will hold classes in glassmaking — provides heat for the hot-water systems. The climate in the galleries, which requires more control, is regulated independently.

For me the meaning of Sanaa’s creation snapped into place when I arrived at an empty room overlooking the back garden. Lined with a few simple benches, this area was conceived as a contemplative space, a place to refuel mentally before venturing back into the galleries. In an age when museums are packed with bookstores, cafes and shops, persuading curators to keep this space empty must have been a triumph.

But it also reveals the architects’ awareness of the delicacy of their own creation. This is not a design that can easily sustain an endless crush of tourist traffic. It recognizes that emptiness, in our world, is increasingly a luxury. It is not architecture with a Big Message. It is about empathy for the human condition. Once you drift outside again, the tree branches seem to sway more gently, the light feels softer, the world more tender. Most important, you are more attuned to the distances between people. There are few higher compliments you could pay a building.

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Hawk Galleries featuring Albert Paley and Christopher Ries at SOFA Chicago 2006

Hawk Galleries is featuring Albert Paley’s new animal series in steel, and Christopher Ries’ exquisite sculpture in optical crystal at SOFA Chicago, November 10-12, 2006 at Chicago’s Navy Pier. View Paley’s and Ries’ work at Hawk Galleries -- Booth #1204. Go to www.sofaexpo.com for more information, or call Hawk Galleries at 614-225-9595.

Download the following PDF for more information.

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