Amazon.com Review
Voluptuous shapes in luscious color, Dale Chihuly's large-scale glass sculptures are all about immediate sensory experience. It's likely no book could capture the intoxication of being in the presence of clusters of glass forms that look like undersea life or tropical forests, hanging overhead or rising up from the floor in fabulous splendor.
Chihuly Projects offers 200 full-page photographs (in supersaturated color) of 34 installations the Seattle artist created over a 30-year span for public and private clients, plus chatty comments by the artist and members of his staff. A fine essay by the art writer Barbara Rose places Chihuly's work in the context of contemporary art and his own life. (An eye injury in the mid-'70s precipitated his shift from blowing individual tabletop glass pieces to becoming the director of a team effort.) But the photographs tend to flatten out Chihuly's generous shapes, and the real-world settings of the sculptures are often so busy visually that, seen from the fixed vantage point of a still photo, they compete distractingly with the art. Although some pieces are shown in different stages of completion, it's hard to grasp how any given project actually comes together from start to finish.
A splashy book that seems to be trying to match the brio and outsized vision of its artist, Chihuly Projects serves primarily as an eye-popping general tour of work that ranges from a 70-by-30-foot ceiling for the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas to an outdoor "chandelier" (for a retreat in Washington State) with 1,200 handblown glass icicles--and an attached heater for melting snow to add hanging pendants of real ice. --Cathy Curtis
From Library Journal
Chihuly's large-scale glass installations are described by art critic Rose as "an incredibly generous and spectacular public art that can delight and amaze, transport and stimulate." The same can be said for the brightly colored full-page photographs of 33 projects from Chihuly's workshop that form the bulk of this book. Photographs of both finished installations and various stages in their creation, as well as written comments by Chihuly and members of his workshop, give readers a sense of how these works were created. Essays by Rose and Lanzone make references to so many artists and critics that they will not be meaningful to readers who do not already have wide knowledge of art, but most of the book can be enjoyed by general readers, though Donald Kuspit and Jack Cowart's Chihuly (Abrams, 1999. 2d ed.) provides a fuller overview of Chihuly's glass art.AKathryn Wekselman, M.Ln., Cincinnati
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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