Artwork of the 80's
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Artists & Works
Marvin Lipofsky
American (b. 1938)
SKETCH (4 works, 2 shown) (1972-4)
blown glass with colored decoration
various dimensions, approx. 5” x 10” x 2” each

STYLE: GLASS

  

Marvin Lipofsky studied sculpture at the University of Wisconsin, where he studied with a pioneer in the glass movement, artist Harvey Littleton. Lipofsky went on to develop one of the first glass programs at Berkeley in 1964. Known as one of the first artists to make entirely non-utilitarian objects from glass, and the father of the contemporary glass movement, Lipofsky’s works of the early seventies dabbled in funk and popular culture, but the pieces he became most known for were Abstract-Expressionist forms, globe-based, sensual, and semi-opaque. Lipofsky has worked in major glass studios, workshops, and factories all over the world, including Italy, Czechoslovakia, Sweden, Poland, and Pilchuck, the glass school founded by Dale Chihuly. Lipofsky’s works can be found in many major collections of contemporary art and craft, including the Metropolitan Museum and the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian.

The Sketches, with their organic forms and interesting surface treatments, are typical of Lipofsky’s early abstract works in hot blown glass.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Cheryl White, American Craft, 7/91
“His sculptures speak eloquently of the hot-forming process and the material’s multifaceted capacity for beauty. But they speak just as definitively of Lipofsky’s avocation as a kind of roving ambassador of glass.”
“Glass Art,” Sunset, 10/86
“Until the early 1960s, the expense of building huge industrial glass furnaces and holding them at high temperatures had limited the working of glass to factory production. Then, artist Harvey Littleton, assisted by chemist and inventor Dominick Labino, designed and built a studiosize, relatively inexpensive glass furnace.
No longer was this craft reserved for a select few. Now artists were willing to share as they reinvented old techniques and experimented with new ones.
Littleton taught students at the University of Wisconsin, and some of them-- including Marvin Lipofsky of the California College of Arts and Crafts (CCAC) in Oakland, and Dale Chihuly, co-founder of the Pilchuck Glass School, near Seattle --started programs on the West Coast.”