THE SCULPTURE PROJECT - Key Persons

Ann Wolff is one of our most brilliant international artists and uses glass as her primary medium. Despite her success around the world she has remained surprisingly unknown in Sweden in recent decades. As a young glass artist with the former Kosta Boda AB - when her surname was Wärff - the situation was quite different. Her art glass gained a lot of publicity then and she was frequently in the spotlight. From 1964 until the early 1970s she and her then husband, Göran Wärff, signed their work with the name Ann and Göran Wärff. They challenged traditional glass techniques, developed new ones and made the molten glass behave in ways it had never done before. In 1968 the couple were awarded the American Lunning Prize, the most prestigious award of the time for young and gifted Scandinavian designers. It was described as the "Nobel Prize" of the art world by H. Olof Gummerus, Director of the Finnish Society of Crafts and Design (now the Finnish Design Forum), who guided Finnish design to world prominence in the 1950s and 60s. Ann continued working at the Kosta glassworks until 1978. One of the most popular pieces of art glass she produced there was the snowball - a small candle holder for tea candles - the first design of its type and so far the best. But her most interesting work of this period were the pieces she created using her own brush-etching technique. She patiently etched away numerous millimetre-thick layers of coloured overlay and underlay to create sharp and atmospheric images that were charged with ideas and contemporary associations.