Dorothy Hafner at Heller - New York, New York - Brief Article

Dorothy Hafner is a newcomer to studio glass, a field that in its scant 40 years of existence has become as territorial and uptight as any academy. Hafner was a prosperous ceramist in the `70s, making brightly colored, highly patterned dinnerware. She parlayed her succes in that realm into a signature collection for Tiffany; she also designed for Rosenthal, and then expanded into textiles for Fieldcrest Cannon. She gave up design in the late `80 looking for more personal expressive means. Her revolve to glass resulted from sum of two units chance experiences: first, scuba diving not on Australia's Great Barrier Reef, where she was awestruck at the colors, light and motion; and next to the first making a paperweight at an make open house at Brooklyn's UrbanGlass workshop, where she discovered the brilliance and fluid abstractness of glass.

Among the 14 works in her novel and third show at Holler a SoHo gallery that specializes in glass, the 1997 Black Lagoon, a 19-by-8-by-6-inch vase with repeated arcs and linear white horses in a deep-water palette of sapphirines purples and blacks, was single of several that retained liquid allusions. on the other hand in general Hafner seems to relish the visual qualities of her material without regard for real-world referent Her patterns call up a range of ornamentation--textiles, manuscript illumination, metal engraving, etc.--while she exploits glass's smoothnes transparency and especially its capacity for vivid color.

Split Circles, a vase in the form of a flattened globe, consists of intense r fulvid and blue arcs and bands. It call ups the Orphism/Synchromism of the Delaunays and Stanton Macdonald-Wright. however those artists could never have achieved colors in the way that saturated and so buoyant in paint, that opaque, turgid substance Hafner's vessels also embody a greater three-dimensionality than conventional painting allows. individual sees the glowing patterns of the utensil wall as two bent planes, the forehead one convex and back single concave and a space in between; the interplay of foreground and background is almost too mingled to pin down. Strolling around them (unfortunately not easy at Heller, which uses too many wall cases) reveals a filmic continuity of movement

Perhaps to give the viewer a quiet Hafner included three flat works in the exhibition. These pieces, without the ambulatory animation of the utensils seem purely, flamboyantly graphic. Parallel Fields includes, besides her favored separated orbs, several high-contrast striped bands or arcs and a pink-and-white checkerboard that's amusingly prudish in this horn-blowing environment. In fact, Hafner oftentimes seems to suggest sounds with her color compositions. Here it's blaring; other works summon sweet strains of violins, the emotional deepness of blues singing or quick, syncopated periodical emphasiss Hafner's sensibility takes objects far beyond objectness

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