Ann Wolff
Swedish artist Ann Wolff splits her time between her studios in Germany and Sweden, creating powerful, thought-provoking work in glass using a variety of techniques. Over the past 50 years, Wolff's drawings, collages and sculpted pieces have delved into her symbolic personal vocabulary with remarkable depth and honesty.
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Ann Wolff has had her fair share of personal and artistic crises, but since winning the First Coburg Glass Prize in 1977 she has been recognized the world over as one of the most important artists working with glass. She was born in Lübeck in 1939. From 1956 to 1959 she attended the legendary Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, but abandoned her studies and moved to Sweden to work as a designer for the glass industry. In 1977 she joined the faculty of the Pilchuck Glass School at Stanwood, near Seattle, and the following year set up a studio of her own at Transjö in Sweden. She began holding glass workshops virtually the world over, and from 1993 to 1998 taught at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg.
Wolff is a versatile artist. Her approach to glass is rooted in the graphic arts, which she has practiced all her life and which have prompted her to develop her own glass working techniques. She is also a sculptor committed to using other materials in addition to glass. A ceaseless experimenter, she does not hesitate to turn to the art of both the past and the present for stimuli, but without ever copying the work of others. This is particularly noticeable in her glass 'collages'. In these she attaches pieces of overlay or painted glass to sheets of colorless glass and arranges the sheets behind one another to generate a sense of spatial recession. She draws on her personal vocabulary of images in these works, notably heads with two faces, a mask-like one on the outside, and a hidden one on the inside. In her mould-melted sculptures Wolff treads her own distinctive path, not least when she dissects closed forms or separates individual motifs from a solid piece of glass and uses them like a relief.
Ann Wolff's work has been exhibited extensively throughout Europe, North America and Asia. Her pieces are featured in some of the world's finest public collections, including Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York; Glasmuseet Ebeltoft in Ebeltoft, Denmark; the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, New York; Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, France; Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg, Germany; National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, Japan; National Museum Stockholm in Stockholm, Sweden and Victoria & Albert Museum in London, England. In 2008, Wolff was the recipient of the Award of Excellence presented by the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., and in 1997, Ann Wolff received the prestigious Rakow Commission from Corning Museum of Glass.
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