Articles from various publications around the world. New articles to be posted on a quarterly basis. Fire and Glamour: the Polish artist's works of glass are gleaming enigmas D.K. Row Published in The Oregonian Newspaper, 9 July, 1999 When you think of glass art, you think in part of the Herculean process that goes into the making of works that sometimes are no larger than a flower vase. No surprise, then, that the face of the medium often has been defined by a sweaty ethos whose heights can presumably be reached Only by such macho provocateurs as Dale Chihuly. If you look at Anna Skibska's new exhibit at the Bullseye Connection's new space in the Pearl District, you'll see works that are antithetical to much of what the general public might presume about glass art. Skibska, a wispy, rail-thin Polish artist with a background in architecture, won't be found sweating profusely with a cadre of admirers beside her to make her glass pieces. Instead, she'll pull out a Bic-sized blowtorch that fits nicely in her handbag and begin fusing glass shards and sticks into shapes that actually enliven overused superlatives like poetically ambiguous and otherworldly. This she did several months ago in an interview-pull out a blowtorch from her purse and start torching away on single tensile-like bars of glass that she molded into ribbons of sharpened poetry. This she does in her new exhibit, which is made up of more than a dozen works with amazing configurations and a collective aural consciousness that will overwhelm you as though you've seen the distant stars up close. Perhaps the first thing viewers will be puzzled by visually is Bullseye's new space, which is across the street from its retail center on Northwest Everett Street at 13th Avenue. Years ago, when the Pearl was not so shiny, the space was a fish-smoking plant. That may help explain why the winding pathways of the second story room-which is all wood, unfinished and infused with a staleness that hints of having been empty-is sectioned into small cubicles. Now, and for the rest of the month, each cubicle houses one of Skibska's starkly lit, colorless works, which alternately hang from the ceiling or sit askew like cosmic artifacts that have traveled for our viewing pleasure from Roswell, NM. All this seemingly innocuous context, however, is key to embracing Skibska's exhibition. The rough edges of the space, as well as its darkness and austerity, accentuate Skibska's glamorous and glistening works, which are also hidden in nooks and crannies and spaced between one another like the planets above us are to one another. Together, the physical site and artworks make for an installation unequaled this year in Portland. For a glass artist, Skibska's work isn't predicated or determined by the physical process as it might be for her peers. Using her mini blowtorch, Skibska molds thin, transparent glass bars into ribbon shapes, which are then fused together, one after another, to form larger pieces and eventually structures. One way to imagine Skibska's work is to consider the glass bars as tiny Lego building blocks, molded and then attached together into structures that could occupy entire rooms. The shapes Skibska creates include variations on ovals, cylinders and biomorphic forms, as well as other architecturally influenced structures. Skibska composes all of these with her trademark spider-web-grid formations that result from fusing one piece of glass to another. Because the glass is colorless, it shimmers slightly, and when it's lighted by the focused ray of light above, the sculpture, for that is what it is, suggests the intensity of something not quite man-made. Indeed, though many of the works hang or sit in the middle of the main entrance room, those works in the chamber rooms inspire the most mystery. One, shaped like an open umbrella, reverberates of the influence of Marcel Duchamp. Yet, shrouded in darkness, its most vital reference would be as an acid version of a Barney's store window display in the dead of winter. No insult here, because those store windows were, for a time, more inspiring than anything showing at New York's Whitney Museum. Yes, mystery is everything in the work of Skibska, and one gets the feeling that her pieces have specific stories behind them. I suggest that when you ascend the stairs to the dark, second-story exhibit space, you enter knowing as little as possible. The Polish artist… Dan Kany Comments published on the website of William Traver Gallery, Seattle by Dan Kany, Associate Director The Polish artist Anna Skibska has not only invented a powerful style, but she has pursued its possibilities with courageous wit and a range of aesthetic programs that never fall short of brilliant. Skibska's glass matrix fascinates. She produces her pieces by using a torch to stretch and bend slender glass canes into delicate sculptures. The style immediately draws natural forms to mind-spider webs, crystals, honeycombs, and so on-but with Skibska's spiritedly romantic mind and academic education, the matrices grow into forms that mingle poetically and thoughtfully with the world. Skibska's forms often allude to materials radically different than her delicate glasswork-a stone tower, a door, a window, or even a stone. The irony is beautiful and because it lacks any hint of heavy-handedness, it is intelligent and alluring. Anna Skibska: Wroclaw, Poland Excerpted from Jennifer Frehling Zamboli and Robert Mickelson Mondo Fiamma: A Global Overview of Flameworked Glass Art Anna Skibska is perhaps best known for the enormous and impossibly fragile objects she makes in glass. Immense webs composed of tiny glass strands are even more amazing because they replicate massive and heavy architectural elements. Objects and events in her surroundings, such as a fireworks explosion, clouds, or stars, are portrayed in gossamer webs of glass. Skibska is the originator of this technique, which several other women artists have adopted. Their work shares the common characteristic of being crafted from clear or colored glass melted at the torch and drawn into tiny, irregular strands. These strands are then welded into a much larger whole using a simple hand-held jeweler’s torch. The sculptures are larger than human scale and are incredibly intricate, fragile, and ephemeral. Skibska was born in Kluczbork and attended the Academy of Art in Wroclaw, Poland, studying painting, glass design, and graphic arts. Since 1985, she has taught at the same school, and in 1994 and 1996 she was a faculty member at Pilchuck Glass School where she later was elected to the school’s International Council. She was an artist-in-residence at the Pratt Fine Art Center in Seattle in 1996. Labyrinths of Light Alberto Toso Fei This article appeared in Vetro Magazine as Labirinti di Luce in the fall of 2000. It was based on a conversation with the author and the artist in Venice at the San Nicolo Gallery on the occasion of the exhibition Anna Skibska: Crossing the Borderline with a Thread. Her insight is so personal that it defies definition, and indeed Anna Skibska-whose gossamer hanging glass rod structures have been exhibited for the first time in Venice at the San Nicolo Gallery-is slightly piqued and feels hemmed in by the various attempts to define her with a single word: artist, architect, sculptor. “I am Anna Skibska”, she answers without hesitation, and by this she means that the value of her creations finds its meaning in the emotions it evokes, and given this very intimate nature, it cannot accept to be labeled. “These are light traps,” she explained when speaking of the exhibition. The works displayed here are decidedly smaller than the usual Skibska standards, lamp-worked creations that can be over twelve meters long. According to Anna Skibska, a native of Wroclaw in Poland, “Light is the most important element in life; in the dark, it is impossible to see beauty. I have tried to conquer my feelings by conquering new spaces conceptions for myself.” And in truth, what is offered to our sight is not something we have seen before; if anything, Anna Skibska’s ethereal structures look like their creator, if one is lucky enough to have had the chance to get to know her; apparently thin, delicate, simple, they are on the contrary surprisingly profound, inhabiting a different space in every moment, in a time and light that in the (again only apparent) fixity of works create instead an unstoppable movement. It is once again movement that drives Skibska in her continuous search for new conceptions of time, space, and light, the same elements she missed most in the years of her training, in the Poland Wojciech Jaruselsky. The bleakness surrounding her in those years did not discourage her in the least. “I’ve always felt the need to be working, to create something, and the emptiness that reigned in our academies could not stop me. I have been learning since then, I keep on learning and I am still seeking my true nature.” In describing her work and the concepts underlying it, Anna Skibska resorts to mythology, and speaks of the princess who, having received a hide, and all the land it could contain, in exchange for a night of love, cut it into such thin strips that it circumscribed an area big enough to build Carthage on it. The thread then, to capture space-that is what Anna is doing today and what Ariadne did in Knossos, when with a thread, she conquered the space of the maze and freed Athens from the Minotaur. The same thread, turned into glass, runs today like a small river of light, illuminating every corner. “With this thread I shall build my empire,” explains Anna Skibska. And carve out a place for herself. From the beginning… Marjorie Levy From notes for a book in preparation, 1 July, 2000 From the beginning, Anna Skibska was original in her approach to objects and images. As a trained painter, her first impulse was to use color (blue, yellow, red, green) and then, as an architect, to add structure. Linear elements came quickly, always in simple and available materials (glue, metal, wire, paper, ready-made objects, engraved lines) to separate areas of color and add visual information. Initially she organized fields with texture, introduced organizational complexity, and created informational signals. And, soon after, in a reductive mode, eliminated most color to put emphasis on the critical aspects of the forms. The result is pioneering monumental works dependent on complex structural phenomena and expressing an aesthetic dependent on light and space, an aesthetic blending art and architecture with opportunity and circumstance that is unique in the world. Skibska’s early work was observational, and in a micro-way looked at the simplicities of life and noted them. She drew on glass with stones and made images of cats, twigs, and space, capturing moments in time that were particular and personal observations, pictures of moments. Why glass? It was cheap and available. Her drawings on glass…which others have associated with the ‘stained glass’ movement were done independently with no knowledge or influence of others. Similarly, her personal vision and sensibility were, in their comparative expressive bravado, after the fact, an interesting counterpoint to prevailing communist doctrine and personal (not political). Anna Skibska - Master of Glass from Kluczbork Rainer Sachs Excerpted from pages 199 - 206 of the 1990 Annual Book of Art and Culture in Upper Silesia Despite the fact that Anna Skibska belongs to the young generation of artists, she has already received more positive reviews than any contemporary Silesian artist. She certainly can not complain about absence of invitations to present her work. She first presented it in Desa, a Polish state-owned trader of art and antiques, situated in Wroclaw in Kosciuszko square (formerly Tauentzien square) in March and April and then in November and December 1986. Her subsequent collections were exhibited in the same place in May and June 1987, in April 1988 and in October 1989. Concurrently she showed her work in December 1987 at her individual exhibition at the site of a famous avant-garde theater "STU" in KrakÛw. The response of the critics and of the wide public was very favorable, which is substantiated by the fact that her works were bought by Polish and foreign visitors and practically each exhibition resulted in further offers. As early as in 1986 she and two other artists were asked to represent young art from Wroclaw at a special exhibition in one of the best galleries in Warsaw. Soon afterwards first positive reviews of her work appeared in the West. Participation in an exhibition of three artists from Wroclaw held in the foyer of the Municipal Savings Bank in Spir in November 1987 and in a special presentation in Munich entitled "The Young are Modeling" at the International Handicraft Fair in 1988 resulted in short listing her "Cat Ch." as one of the 100 best glass works of art of 1987 by "New Glass Review" from the Museum of Glass in Corning. Anna Skibska studied painting (Prof. Zbigniew KarpiÒski's studio), glass design (doc. Henryk Wilkowski's studio) and graphics (Eugeniusz Get-Stankiewicz's studio) at the Academy of Fine Arts in Wroc_aw. While the former two mentors did not influence the artist's life and work in any particular way, the friendship with Get Stankiewicz has lasted till today with the same intensity - a relationship different in its character from the studio communities Get often formed with his students, forced by tragic lack of working space and the necessity to share the studio. The harmony is not only expressed by common projects, like creating a poster commemorating the 200th anniversary of the Academy of Fine Arts in Wroclaw in 1988 (Anna Skibska made a glass counterpart of Stankiewicz's original to be exhibited in the Academy's Hall) or recreating Get's self-portrait in glass, but also in similar philosophy of life and its understanding. Get Stankiewicz, one of the Great Artists of Polish poster, called by his friends "the spirit who always negates" after Bulgakov's "Knife", has managed in his many works to create impressions and associations which either startle or amaze and bring about a reflection through "innocent" manipulation of forms and symbols surrounding us. Means of expression range from the poster for the performance of the Polish national drama "The Eve of All Souls Day" by Adam Mickiewicz staged by a theater in PoznaÒ, where the self-portrait resembling the effigy of Lenin smashes the head against the red banner cut at the bottom with the precision of the guillotine and the whole scene is accompanied by a comment obvious in its meaning written in pencil: "Nishel's Dream of the Head", while the contrast between the color of blood and the white background brings to mind Polish national colors, to such innocent and human entertainment like "Graphic with Tell", where the historical arrow hits not an apple but Tell's fat son crawling on all fours - the artist's self-portrait. Even though Skibska by no means imitates her master, the success of her work, similarly as his, consists in meeting the highest requirements. Perfection of technique is seen in all her "glass pictures", amazes in "Glass Cracks" or when comparing "the red scarf in the white background" with the "real" one, made of mesh of glass fiber shaped over the burner's flame. The works, obvious at first sight, try our perceptiveness (e.g. "All's Clear" - a palm with six fingers) or speak on selected topics reaching beyond the aesthetic components, as in the work where the spectator can finally no longer recognize whether the contents of a piping at the point of junction of two provisionally linked tubes runs from the red pipe to the blue one or in the opposite direction, or as in "Spirit of Geneva", where rubbing thermometer tubes crossed like swords and filled with red or blue substances enables manipulation with temperature by increasing it. Similarly as Stankiewicz, Skibska wins the spectator with one more feature of her work: her compositions created during the period of struggle and toil, the period of aggressive and intrusive propaganda in art and life never become "timeless" - "superhuman", even when in "Attempt at Flying" they expect a young stork to fly with a chain, which the father holds in the beak (see "The Sun"), in "It will Work Next Time" they indicate the omnipresent and omnipotent cult of incompetence reigning east of the Elbe, and in "Security" they seem to express the simple truth: "you may hang yourself and end your life in this way or you may dance on the tightrope, and then you will probably fall", or when in "Rain" they argue with the current issues, especially burning and tragic for her country. On the contrary, in the world where the struggle between the old and the new made nearly all the parts of society of various ideologies surrender to the temptation of one-sided and often unjustified condemnation, the persons and events from the past included, the artist tries to bring back a humanistic dialogue, sketching it with humor, understanding and tolerance, as in the case of Rosa L., whose underwear she makes move "upstream" - upwards, or as in the case of "Ludwik WaryÒski in Schlisselburg Fortress", the leader of Polish communists, on her request copied from a banknote by the ten-year-old son of the artist's neighbors, who now, painted by a child and closed behind the glass bars, seems to be experiencing neither evil nor cruelty. The extensive range of means of artistic expression was an equally important contribution to the success of the young artist from Kluczbork. Each of her individual exhibitions surprises with its different stylistic and technical aspects. While the exhibitions from 1986 are still dominated by the traditional miniatures made from lead but the year 1987 is rich in the experiments with mullet-layer, abstract and anecdotal performances by small, shining glass beads taking place between two ordinary window panes (e.g. the triptych "He-Dog Shivers and She-Dog 'Perelka' at an Outing"). The year 1988 abounds with the invaluable examples of her masterly control of art - pictures cut out of the whole surface of the material without damaging it. In 1989 Skibska departed even further from the tradition creating works of complicated and delicate compositions, devoid of the support of hermetic glass, set in the frames made of four sticks glued together and thus emanating unusual fragility, intimacy and modesty, yet losing nothing of their spontaneous dynamism (e.g. in the magnificent "Cornflowers"). Owing to their transitoriness, many of her "Tales", like the "Security", "Christmas Tree" or "Falling" mentioned above display some fear, while at the same time they are personal and romantic stories in the good sense of these words. Some of Anna Skibska's works, which may remind of Stankiewicz, while consciously provoking, bring associations forming a considerable challenge for the spectators, their knowledge of literature and politics, and their sense of humor. Similarly, the format she prefers recently, relatively small, not "representative" and the technique departing from the traditionally solid use of lead, right at the beginning single out the educated and spiritually open public. Especially Skibska's first exhibitions manifested her liking for provocation enabling observation of art, culture and sociology and at the same time releasing the joy accompanying "concealed happenings". At the spring presentation she displayed "Chairman's Plate", an ordinary white plate in the lead frame filled with glass. As everyone knew that she meant Wladyslaw Frasyniuk, the leader of the underground resistance movement, the chairman of the Lower Silesian trade union detained shortly before, the plate became a cult object and was an opportunity to demonstrate, however in a somewhat concealed way, the political standing. It was not unusual, considering the fact that such reaction belongs to the canon of behavior and feelings of the Poles, Catholic in their majority, who, often oppressed in the past, mobilized the improbable power of resistance. "The Collection Box for the Contributions to Support Silesian Art of Glass" presented at the next exhibition in Wroclaw was intended to be more of a psychological joke, which was not only supposed to draw attention to the muse's bad financial situation, but also to induce others to follow the good example through the positive action of the artist's authority - before the presentation the artist asked on the side many of her friends to ostentatiously give small contributions and after the opening night she enjoyed herself participating in the endless discussions as to who really was the "real" contributor. It should be also added here that Anna Skibska is (was) an assistant professor in the Chair of Glass Design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Wroclaw, thus sharing the fate of other unusually talented artists from Upper Silesia, who, unable to live normal lives, had to leave their local fatherland searching for the academic support and the more art-friendly environment. Each of her individual exhibitions surprises with its different stylistic and technical aspects.