Matthew Szösz “Air Craft”

Heller Gallery

[Image: Matthew Szösz "untitled(inflatable) no. 85b" fused and inflated glass, 16½ x 16½ x 13 in.]

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Heller Gallery present Air Craft, our first solo exhibition of work by award-winning artist Matthew Szösz. The exhibition focuses on pieces from Szösz’s Inflatables series, low-tension structures constructed at high temperatures with fused sheet glass and compressed air that push the boundaries of form.

Experimentation, a pathfinding interaction with material-driven process and an unmitigated quest for exploration drive the work of this artist and educator. Szösz describes himself as “the child of two ideas. The first is the unreconstructed artisanship tradition in which I was raised. The second is the church of ecstatic blue-collar Rock & Roll anarchy for which I volunteered. This is the territory that excites me—lying between the sensitive and considered restraint of learned technique and the manic populist energy of the rock-throwing iconoclast, described by an urgent elliptical oscillation between the two.”

With a BA (1996) & BID (1997) and MFA (Glass) (2007) from Rhode Island School of Design Matthew Szösz has been recognized with awards including the Irvine Borowsky Prize, the Jutta-Cuny Franz Prize, and a Tiffany Foundation Grant. He has taught at Virginia Commonwealth University, University of Washington, University of Hawaii, Pilchuck Glass School, Penland School of Crafts and at ASP Wrøcław, Amsterdam’s Gerrit Rietveld Academie and Bildwerk Frauenau. A founding member of the curatorial group Hyperopia Projects he was Executive Director of Public Glass, a non-profit public access studio in San Francisco. His work is represented in public institutions including the Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, NY, the Renwick Gallery/Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, the Toyama City Museum of Glass, Toyama, Japan and Het Glazenhuis, Lommel, Belgium.