The Sandra Ainsley Gallery is proud to represent artist Dorothy Hafner.
One of the first American craftspeople to produce her own collection for Tiffany & Co., Hafner was also a principal designer for the venerable Rosenthal, a maker of glass and porcelain, and fashioned handmade ceramics for Neiman Marcus and Henri Bendel.
After being involved in commercial ventures, she later decided to take a glassmaking workshop.“I was hooked right away.”She says.“Why not,” she thought, “capture in glass the play of color, shape and pattern she had experienced scuba diving off the Great Barrier Reef?”In the search for a way to realize her vision, she discovered tesserae (Italian for “mosaic”) a technique popularized in Italy in the 50’s by artisans who created patterned glass objects by rolling a hot molten glass bubble across a mosaic of flat colored glass and, once the mosaic had fused with the bubble, blowing the glass into its final shape.Hafner enlisted Murano, Italy, glass master Lino Tagliapietra in her cause, and together they pushed the limits of tesserae to produce asymmetrical vessels with a contemporary sensibility and an exuberant palette that evoked the sea.
Today, Hafner’s “blown mosaics” can be seen in galleries across the world like the Heller Gallery in New York, and the Sanske Gallery in Zurich.
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