Glass as Material
Art, design and architecture using glass for transparency, colour and light, from blown vessels to sculpture and building.
1 work · 10 related artists
About
Glass is made by melting sand with an alkali such as soda or potash, and while hot it can be cast, blown, pressed, fused or drawn out. Craftsmen in Mesopotamia and Egypt made core-formed vessels in the second millennium BC, and the invention of glassblowing in the eastern Roman world around the 1st century BC turned glass into everyday tableware.
Venice, and above all the island of Murano, led luxury production from the 15th century, developing clear cristallo and lace-like filigrana. Around 1900 Émile Gallé and Louis Comfort Tiffany made glass a leading Art Nouveau medium, and Carlo Scarpa's designs for Venini in the 1930s and 40s gave Murano techniques a modern face. The American studio glass movement, launched by Harvey Littleton's workshops in 1962, brought furnaces into artists' studios and led to Dale Chihuly's large blown installations. Look for bubbles, tool marks and how light bends.
