“The complexity of life and the complexity of glass are very much alike, sometimes murky, harsh and unworkable, and sometimes serenely beautiful.” — Toots Zynsky
“Heller Gallery is pleased to present Past/Present, the gallery’s second solo exhibition of work by award-winning, Providence, RI-based artist Toots Zynsky, on view from January 23 -February 15, 2025. Following Zynsky’s recent solo show at the Newport Art Museum in Newport, Rhode Island, Past/ Present will include 11 works from the artist’s archive dating as far back as the 1980’s alongside eight of her most recent works. This exhibition, Heller Gallery’s first since closing their Chelsea space in June 2024, inaugurates The Curator Lab at 529 West 20th Street.
Zynsky’s distinctive style incorporates her unique technical approach entitled Filet de Verre, wherein sculptural vessel forms are created from thousands of hair-thin extruded Italian glass cane filaments fused together and hand shaped while still hot in her kiln. Distinctly painterly, the instantly recognizable shapes and striking color patterns of Zynsky’s undulating forms speak eloquently of her profound relationship with color.” — Heller Gallery
Installation views of Toots Zynsky Past/Present at Heller Gallery, January 23 – February 15, 2025. Photos by Doug Heller. Courtesy Heller Gallery.
In 1999 Arthur C. Danto, highly respected art critic and Johnsonian Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Columbia University wrote “In an age in which the relevance of beauty to art is widely questioned, Zynsky’s work is uncompromisingly beautiful. It is, however, what the poet André Breton would have called convulsive beauty. The intensity of adjoined color, the tactile vitality of fluted walls, the swirling energies of shape and pattern are transformed into a luminous whole through the interaction between glass and light.”
This month Cara McCarty Curator Emerita, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum and former MoMA curator, called Zynsky a “Choreographer of lines and color” whose works “resemble a sculpted drawing.”
Title image: Toots Zynsky. Seagreen Lovebird II , 2023, filet-de-verre,13 1/2 x 30 1/2 x 15 1/2 in. (34.3 x 77.5 x 39.4 cm). Courtesy Heller Gallery.
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