Adorning the newly built waterfront luxury condo project "Ovation", Huether's O-Wave (2009) employs dichroic glass and stainless steel..
With more than 50 public art projects to his credit, many of them with glass as a central element, Gordon Huether is among the most successful public artists working in any material. Add in the 150 private art commissions he has also completed, and you see how he was able to move his thriving public-art operation (he routinely has 20- to 30-projects in the proposal or fabrication stage at any one time) into a 15,000-square-foot studio and gallery space in the heart of Napa Valley, California, wine country in 2008.
Last week, Huether unveiled his latest sculpture. Budgeted at $400,000, the O-Wave (2009) is a 16-foot tall curving arc of stainless steel and dichroic glass that adds color and flourish to a newly built waterfront condominium project in St. Petersburg, Florida, with its wave-referencing form and active light-catching glass.
With echoes of Tom Patti’s ongoing experiments with dichroic glass but with a completely different aesthetic, Huether’s latest work is an attempt to play off the natural landscape around the new waterfront residence. Huether spoke about his work in a recent press release: “With curves that evoke nearby waters and Ovation’s [the name of the condominium project] own undulating lines, glass that simultaneously transmits and reflects light, and reflective surfaces that capture ambient activity of nearby trees, sky and passersby, the fixed sculpture takes on a distinct animated character, creating a passively kinetic sculpture.”
Adjacent to Huether's new Napa Valley studio is the Hay Barn Gallery, open seven days a week and exhibiting Huether's fine artwork.
In a recent profile of Huether in a luxury lifestyle magazine, he called his new Napa Valley facility “the Taj Mahal of glass art and sculpture studios … plus it has a beautiful fine art gallery as well.” The Hay Barn Gallery (open a tourist-friendly seven days a week) adjacent to his studio is devoted to Huether’s non-comissioned artwork that references the scale of wall-hung paintings, and owes much to Abstract Expressionism and Geometric Abstraction, but replaces the canvas with distressed salvaged metal or glass surfaces.
From October 7th to November 6th, 2009, Huether will be exhibiting his work at San Francisco’s Andrea Schwartz Gallery.
2 Comments
September 29, 2009 at 8:10 PM
Wow .. that is a gorgeous sculpture. Love the combination of stainless steel and stained glass.
February 16, 2010 at 4:31 PM
[...] connecting bridge in an installation entitled Over Houston (2009). The project, just the latest by prolific public artist Gordon Huether, employs 20-foot by 12-foot acid-etched and sand-blasted glass panes that feature brightly colored [...]