Marvin Lipofsky's
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Sculpture - Glass
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Price Range: $20,000 - $38,000
Bio
Marvin Lipofsky spans a 40-plus year career as a glass sculpture artist who today is quite an influential and innovative. He lives and works in Berkeley, CA.
Lipofsky received both his master of fine arts and master of arts from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and earned a bachelor’s of fine arts in industrial design from the University of Illinois, Urbana. He became one of the first students to study with the pioneer of the studio art glass movement, Harvey Littleton.
He went on to introduce glass as an art form into the Design Department of the University of California at Berkeley, and then founded and headed the California College of Arts and Crafts. As a teacher, he has trained a generation of studio artists who currently staff studio glass programs and operate glass studios throughout the country.
Lipofsky had little precedent, little prior technique with studio glass when he started out. His early pieces were experiments in which he explored what could be done with the medium, how glass reacted when manipulated in various ways.
In the California Loop Series, he glued pieces together and he used flocking and paint to cover surfaces. He says that at first he tried to deny the beauty of glass by covering it up. In other works he used electroplating, decals, and mirroring to cover the glass but, as his technique evolved, he no longer covered the surfaces. Lipofsky developed techniques to emphasize the beauty of the surfaces on which color and texture seem an organic part of the medium itself. He dabbled in Funk in his Great American Food series in the early 1970s.
A two-time recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, he is recognized as a pioneer in the contemporary glass movement and perpetuates his involvement by teaching and lecturing at more than 300 national and international workshops, conferences, and universities all over the world. He was a founder of the Glass Art Society, has been selected as an American Crafts Council Fellow and as a Living Treasure of California by the Crocker Art Museum.
This founder of the California studio glass movement and one of the world’s best-know glass artists, has had more than 40 solo exhibitions and has been included in hundreds of group shows. As recipient of numerous international awards, his work can be found in more than 80 museum and corporate collections and numerous private collections, including the Museum of Contemporary Crafts, New York, the Corning Museum, Corning, New York, the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto, Japan, and the Stedelijke Museum in Amsterdam.
Style
Lipofsky is an abstract expressionist, creating nonrepresentational forms that utilize his extraordinary skills to define space (and negative space), the heart of the sculptural process. He approaches glass as an organic, sculptural medium; resulting in his signature amorphic forms. His work often has the look of biomorphic forms -- shells, undersea creatures, exotic flowers, or aesthetic, non-utilitarian objects of glass, known for organic forms and interesting surface treatments. He is best know for his three dimensional globe shaped forms—sensuous with flocking and plated glass surfaces. These sculptural forms are most often semi-opaque on the outside, inviting the viewer to explore their inner dimensions.
Lipofsky has traveled extensively over the years, working with glassmakers in 17 countries around the world, learning from them and absorbing the influences of their cultures and geographies. On his world travels, he seeks out information that informs his work and actively pursues collaborations with other artists in other countries to gain perspective from different cultures.
He is a brilliant colorist and his palette, in particular, seems to reflect the location in which he was working -- rich crimson in China, vivid circus colors in Kentucky, autumn colors in Yugoslavia. In Osaka, he created mold-blown glass pieces in the shape of cones, with color applied to the surfaces that gives the effect of Japanese brush painting. In Hokkaido, he added a bit of woven straw to nearly colorless sandblasted vessels. Pieces executed in Murano are elegantly highlighted with striped patterns.
While the sculptural "voice" of Lipofsky runs through all his work, marking it as unmistakably his, he continues to develop technique and expand his vision as well. Each work has a sense of the new, a freshness which enhances the sheer sensual pleasure that his art so generously offers.
Museum Collections
Oakland Museum of California
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York
Museum Boymans-Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Holland
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania
Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art, Sapporo, Japan
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California
Renwick Gallery of the National Museum of American Art
Smithsonian Institution
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