Göran Wärff

Goran Warff is a Searcher for Freedom with his Heart in Kosta!
Glass is oxygen - light is energy - glass is light, muses glass poet Goran Warff, who is constantly on the search for a glassiness, a special expression of light in glass. He cares deeply about time-honoured glass-making traditions like grinding and engraving, and uses grinding himself to try to access the hidden treasures of the glass. A simple shape takes on new, unexpected dimensions with a few snips through the melt ... If you turn the sculpture just a hair, it changes completely. Born in 1933. Goran Warff has been a designer at Kosta Boda since 1964 with a studio at the Kosta glassworks.

Göran Wärff belongs to an exclusive group of Swedish artists whose work is as well known among glass aficionados abroad as in Sweden. Since the mid-sixties, when he arrived at Kosta Boda, he has been a seminal figure in Swedish glass art. His work is represented at museums in USA, Japan, Australia and Europe.

When he received the Lunning Award in 1968, Göran Wärff was hailed for his view of glass as "the embodiment of light", a defining characteristic of his artistic work ever after.

"I’m trying to get at what might be called the primordial nature of glass, the place from which the light emanates. Glass is oxygen; light is energy; glass is light," he has said, describing his work and his approach. "The energy that has flowed forth from all the glowing furnaces over the years feels to me like a charge, a vibration of light that guides me. That, for me, is the tradition. But it is the future that draws me along in my quest for an essential `glassness´, an expressive light that feels important to me right now."

Wärff studied architecture and design in Brunswick, Ulm and Stockholm. In the seventies, he emigrated to Australia, nevertheless remaining in contact with Kosta Boda. While he was there, he took a creative detour, serving as an art director for Peter Weir on the film "The Last Wave". He lived in England from 1981 to 1985, teaching and working as an artist. In 1986, he at last returned to Kosta, the mother lode of Swedish glass; his heart had never left it. His studio is there today, not far from the cutting and engraving shops.

Wärff has worked to uphold the classic arts of the glassmaker, especially such traditional techniques such as cutting and engraving. As long as he has anything to say about it, Wärff has proclaimed, there will always be cutters at Kosta. He uses cutting as a means of revealing the hidden glories of glass.

A simple form, an otherwise rather ordinary bowl, takes on unexpected dimensions with a few artful incisions straight through its massive surface...

"Göran Wärff shapes the material organically, his senses wide open to the genesis of the glass," wrote art critic Dag Widman. In 1995, Karin Asmundsson of Östra Småland wrote, "Many of his sculptures have a meditative quality. If you give them the slightest turn, they are utterly changed."

In the nineties, he has done a number of portraits in glass, a somewhat different strategy for bringing forth the spirit of the material. He has also done a number of monumental installations, including a shimmering glass "hammock", beautifully suspended at Smålands Museum in Växjö in 1994. Also in the nineties, he produced lovely special tables with glass legs for a number of exhibits. He designed a baptismal font for Växjö Cathedral, Livets källa - "Wellspring of Life" - an acclaimed and airy assemblage of glass and stone. His latest installation was `The Paravane´, a nearly two-metre high folding wall of glass, inspired by the Nordic light. The Paravane was last exhibited at the prestigious Harrods in London.

Wärff has been a bold experimentalist during his second period at Kosta. As the inquisitive - indeed, questing - artist himself puts it, "Designing glass is like collecting stones on the beach - you have to be in the mood.. He relates that he once found an eighteenth-century bowl deeply buried in the sand in Australia. A greeting, a messenger from times gone by, from the era of Kosta’s founding.

Series such as Azurro, Sydney and Seaside, consisting of vases, bowls and table sculptures, are among his most popular productions from the 1990s. Wärff has worked with the glass grinders at Kosta to design several functional and decorative objects all based on the art of grinding. The soft, rounded shapes, generated by masters of the art with many years of experience, are inspired by the sea and wind. Tiny, feathery light air bubbles create elegant decorations on the clear crystal surface.

"Many of my pieces draw on my experience of nature," he says. "I grew up next to the sea." Nature has been an excellent source of inspiration reflected in the work. "I may have been subconsciously inspired when I sailed past the fascinating silhouette of the famous Sidney opera house many years ago," says Göran Wärff.

The Limelight dish service from 1985 is `Excellent Swedish Design´ at its best, a real top-seller for Kosta Boda. More recently, Wärff has launched several additions to the Limelight series - a sophisticated candle lantern of clear glass with a gold edge, and elegant champagne glasses of clear glass or gold. Another new product is Zoom, with flowing light and a colour scale that call to mind fire and the sea - a classic combination of the glass poet’s key sources of inspiration.