The Glass Menagerie

THE GLASS MENAGERIE

An exhibition highlighting new works by four of the world’s top glass artists:

Jon Kuhn, Stephen Rolfe Powell, Marlene Rose and David Bennett

June 9 – July 9, 2006 at our Legacy Village Location

The Contessa Gallery at Legacy Village is proud to present to the Cleveland public a rare and unique opportunity to see four of the world’s top glass artists brought together in one exquisite show.

Although artisans have been blowing glass for thousands of years, each of the artists presented in the show pushes the medium to a new level with their innovation and uniqueness.

It is this innovation that makes Jon Kuhn one of the leading glass artists in the world. While most glass artists work with molten or blown glass, Jon Kuhn works in cold glass that is cut, polished and fused into a myriad of shapes from the inside out. The result is a sculpture that takes in surrounding light, then reflects and refracts it back into space much like a fine diamond. No two pieces are alike and once created, they are timeless as they appear to change color and radiance when viewed from different angles and lighting.

David Bennett is also pushing the technique by making complex forms in glass and bronze that could not be done in either medium alone. “As we’ve stretched the technical processes of blowing glass into metal, I’ve had more and more artistic freedom. Our figures can be lighter and wilder in their motions, and we’ve become able to manipulate the glass around its armatures in increasingly playful ways,” the artist says.

An artist of international recognition, Stephen Powell is known as a master of casing blown vessels in a multi-colored, textural veil of murrini. Created through a sequence of rolling and melting various predetermined patterns of thousands of colored murrini, his vessels have captured the hearts of collectors, glass enthusiasts and clients worldwide with their size, form and, of course, their brilliant and luscious colors. 

An innovation truly unique to Marlene Rose’s work is her use of found objects as integral parts of her creations making each piece both ancient and modern. Each is hand cast from molten glass in a spectacular process of heat and light. “My goal as an artist is to inject life into whatever I make. In simple terms - to make the piece come alive.”

Glass immortalizes a glimpse of something fleeting beyond the moment, taking that moment and freezing it over. Come to the Contessa Gallery to enjoy these masterpieces, their subtlety and beauty, their search for the optical exhilaration that starts where language ends and taste begins.