Ann Wolff

Biography

Ann Schaefer was born in Lübeck in 1937. Through her marriage to the Swedish glass artist Goran Wärff she became Ann Wärff and after her divorce from him, in a bid to re-assert her own personality and identity as a woman, changed her name to Wolff, after her maternal grandmother, a woman of great personality and strength. Like everything in Ann's life, this was a decision born of great contemplation.1937, the year of Ann's birth, was also the year when Picasso completed Guernica the most famous political painting of the 20th century. Ann's triangular heads and her use of symbols as a narrator are closely related to Picasso's emotional work. The duality that characterizes Guernica is always there in one form or another in Ann Wolff's work too, whether through the device of repeated symbols in her layered glass compositions or the twinned forms that are a recurring motif of hers. Ann is much concerned by the ever-present concept of duality in our existence.

If her complicated personality belongs to any group, it is to a group of thinkers concerned with expressing themselves in one artistic medium or another about the emancipation of women. Everything she does as a mother, as an artist, as an entrepreneur, as a teacher and as a friend underscores her commitment to womankind.

Ann Wolff moves from one medium to another with ease and fearlessness. For her technique is no more than a new set of rules, which she learns often with the assistance of others. She recognizes talent in others and has no conscience about making full use of it given the opportunity.

There is great clarity and inner calm about Ann's most recent sculptural work. Although it does not necessarily take up more space than some of her earlier work what she now makes is much grander, much more heroic in scale. It has show-stopping quality without being theatrical. The statements are more meaningful than when she was using a lot of decoration, the lyricism more intense. She has shown an extraordinary power to invent form and has a great feeling for surfaces. In one way or another body parts still play an important role, more often than not the head. After some initial problems she has now grasped fully what cast glass can do. With careful grinding and polishing it can draw you into a piece like no other material can. The heads have their form and their texture: these are their skin and bones. But they also allow you a glimpse of arcane spaces within, in the most magical way, as if enabling one to penetrate thought.

Awards

Coberg Prize for Modern Glasswork in Europe, 1977
Central Switzerland Glass Prize, Lucerne, Switzerland, 1980
Gold Medal, International Glass Art, Kassel, Germany
Gold Medal, Bavarian State Prize, 1988  
Rakow Commission, Corning Museum of Glass, 1997

Public Collections / Museums

Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art, Japan
Düsseldorf Art Museum, Germany
Lobmayr Museum, Vienna, Austria
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Mint Museum of Craft + Design, Charlotte, North Carolina
National Museum of Art, Tokyo, Japan; Toledo Museum of Art Ohio
Albert and Victoria Museum, London.