Through the Looking Glass: Dale Chihuly’s Four Decades of Iconic Work at Leila Heller

Dale Chihuly, Celadon Umber Persian Wall, 2018. Blown glass, 55 x 141 x 18 in. © 2018 Chihuly Studio. All rights reserved.

By BRUCE HELANDER May 25, 2024

Internationally acclaimed artist Dale Chihuly’s first extensive exhibition in the United Arab Emirates is titled “Chihuly: Four Decades of Iconic Work,” elegantly showcased by the Leila Heller Gallery in Dubai and featuring works that span a nearly forty-year period from 1985 to 2023. This dashingly colorful gathering of often translucent sculptural forms celebrates a six-decade career through the artist’s monumental installations and over fifty of his assorted transparent smaller scale works, ranging from his renowned glass basket series, cylinders and hanging chandeliers to the two-dimensional forms initially created as preparatory conceptual drawings.

This strikingly handsome exhibition, on view for the entire summer through September 2024, recalls Chihuly’s exquisite glass on display in a previous gallery show at the Dubai International Financial Centre over sixteen years ago, when he had just begun to substantially expand his color palette and groundbreaking reputation with large-scale installations. As the curator of this exhibition, which included numerous other art world notables, it was clear to me almost immediately that Chihuly was stealing the show. He also exhibited in the Middle East in 1999 at the Citadel Tower of David Museum in Jerusalem, where I had the pleasure of observing the talents of this remarkable artist and creative coordinator (not surprisingly, his father was a union organizer, and his mother an avid gardener) that directed a team of over thirty assistants to assemble and install compositions within the walls of the Citadel, the oldest fort in the Middle East, a show that attracted over one-million visitors.

Dale Chihuly, Float Quad Drawing, 2015. Acrylic on paper, 84 x 60 in. © 2015 Chihuly Studio. All rights reserved.

Chihuly is the Jackson Pollock of glass. Pollock’s masterful breakthrough of abstraction and paint application was revolutionary and controversial and changed the way that we perceived picture-making. Harvey Littleton, Chihuly’s first professor at the University of Wisconsin, opened Chihuly’s eyes to unlimited creative opportunities. “Without a doubt, Harvey Littleton was the force behind the Studio Glass Movement. Without him, my career wouldn’t exist,” Chihuly said in “Harvey K. Littleton: A Life in Glass” by Joan Falconer Byrd (a Western Carolina University professor of ceramics and former student of Littleton’s). Chihuly completely immersed himself in a new way of studying a conventional medium, which changed the way we now appreciate constructed glass objects. To summarize the growth of producing contemporary glass objects, one might consider the established state of glass before Chihuly came along. “B.C.” (before Chihuly) and “A.D.” (after Dale) are circumstantial abbreviations that still hold true. Simply put, with few exceptions, such as Professor Littleton, Chihuly changed everything, even making Seattle one of the best-known centers for glass blowing in the world. 

He had been determined to learn the original skills of Venetian glass blowers firsthand and received a Fulbright Award to study glass blowing in Venice. For centuries small glass objects were produced by artisans primarily from the nearby island of Murano that were technically perfect albeit commercial, but lacked the courage and foresight to leave tradition and invent a new way of looking at glass in a non-narrative, non-utilitarian context. At the time, Chihuly’s early experiments were a totally revolutionary idea, as most glass artists usually were involved in spinning small-scale decorative objects that were representative of realistic, unimaginative organic items such as birds and fish. Somehow, Chihuly realized early on that the only way to examine his vision to expand the vernacular of contemporary glass was to visit the birthplace of decorative glass blowing and assimilate those techniques, but add an unexpected literal twist initially overlooked by other artists and critics. As Chihuly’s ambitious explorative repertoire expanded on a larger scale, the face of traditional glass objects changed forever. 

Installation—Chihuly: Four Decades of Iconic Work. Leila Heller Gallery, Dubai. Photo Credit: Shihan Dissanayake

For hundreds of years the only acceptable works on canvas or board were strictly limited to portraits, landscapes, and floral compositions. Picasso and Braque challenged that custom by taking a heroic dive into changing the way we perceive painting. Controversy seems to be a necessary evil in the art world (Andy Warhol thrived on it, for example), where sacred and traditional notions slowly matured amid often damning critical debate, leading eventually into abstraction, which led to non-narrative imagery on canvas as well as sculpture. 

This exhibition juxtaposes the high-ceilinged white space of Leila Heller Gallery with an outstanding display of Chihuly’s glass in luminous colors, giving the momentary impression of ricocheting billiard balls bouncing from one imposing wall to another. A tall construction of yellow-green icicle-like blown glass forms gives the impression of an upside-down pine tree, a perfectly groomed balancing act that becomes the de facto center of a viewer’s attention. Another rectangular display highlights Chihuly’s vibrantly colored glass “baskets,” which are iconic and perhaps his most significant, identifiable international trademark. Prior to Chihuly’s innovative irregular forms, almost all glass artists had a strict provision that blown glass cylinders and other shapes required perfectly circular symmetry or they were tossed back into the oven’s “glory hole.” During his early years, Chihuly came across ancient Native American baskets in a Washington State museum that were falling or leaning in uneven directions, prompting an “ah- ha” moment for the artist. This vintage shape discovery was later incorporated into his hot glass studio projects, which repeatedly emphasized the aesthetic of irregular balance. This unconventional thematic choice eventually was transferred to much of his other work, except for his exacting Niijima floats, which bobbed and danced on the waters of Venice as well as in private ponds from Southampton to Seattle.

Dale Chihuly, Peridot Green Icicle Tower, 2023. Blown glass and steel, 163 x 74 x 70 in. © 2023 Chihuly Studio. All rights reserved.

Taking a cue from artists like the late Frank Stella, Chihuly engages in an energetic ritual of advanced conceptual “drawings” that later are refined as a guide and put into a practical context that he shares with his glass blowing team. According to his mother Viola, he began sketching with crayons and pencils at the age of three and has continued this attraction to drawing during his entire illustrious career. The gradual evolution of these intriguing “drawings” was created from a variety of mediums, primarily acrylic paint fresh from the tube. In the Dubai show, a dynamic variety of paintings on view offer context for the early conceptual development of actual glass works. Curiously, much of the preliminary painted backgrounds of these fresh works is reminiscent of Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings as well as the color field paintings of Lawrence Poons. Accenting the installations are a series of floating forms attached to the walls that are delightful abstract flower-like shapes. In the case of his yellow Persians, the floating shapes give an impression of butterflies on a mission. 

This memorable exhibition at Leila Heller Gallery in Dubai is arguably the most inspirational and visually stunning show in the Middle East.

For more information: http://www.leilahellergallery.com/exhibitions/chihuly-four-decades-of-iconic-work  WM