Anna Skibska

Anna Skibska is a German glass artist that graduated from the Painting program at the Academy of Art in Wroclaw, Poland in 1984. She later was a professor of fine arts and architecture at the Academy of Art. Growing up in Eastern Europe under communism, she lacked some of the material goods that children in Western countries have. Her work sits at the intersection of sculpture, architecture, three-dimensional line drawing, and even storytelling. She uses a powerful acetylene torch to melt and stretch glass rods, creating slender and transparent threads, that are then joined to create perfectly balanced sculptures. Her signature technique, known as the Anna Skibska Technique, was developed in the early 1990s. It is with this that she has wraps space, embraces time, and traps light, working on them simultaneously from the same beginning.

Her early glass work was much different than the ornate glass sculptures she makes today. Skibska created simple forms in stained glass with materials that were inexpensive and available. In the late 1980s, she applied for inclusion in New Glass Review, an American journal publishing the work of top glass artists. It required her to submit slides of her work — in Communist Poland, making and obtaining slides was costly and difficult — but she managed to have three made. The appearance of those slides in the 1988 edition of New Glass Review was a turning point in Skibska’s career. Susanne Frantz, a curator at the Corning Museum of Glass in New York, noticed Skibska’s work and recommended her to be an instructor at the Pilchuk School of Glass in Stanwood, Wash. With a Soros Foundation grant, Skibska moved to Seattle in 1996.  Prior to immigrating to Seattle in, she had already exhibited her work extensively throughout Europe and Japan. She went on to exhibit internationally, including in the Tuileries in Paris, Musee-Atelier du Verre, Museo del Vetro in Murano (coinciding with the Venice Biennale), National Museum in Wroclaw, and in a solo exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum. In 1998, she served as an instructor for creative glass at the Niijim Glass Art Center, in Jiijim, Japan. In 2004, the flameworking studio in Pratt Fine Arts Center in Seattle, WA was officially named the Anna Skibska Flameworking Studio. Skibska continues to be an influential artist in the Seattle art community.

Trained in fine arts, now recognized as a sculptor of glass, Skibska has made it apparent that it is only one medium that truly conveys her thoughts and embodies her visions. Embroidering the ‘incorporeal’ mass of the glass with the same ability, Skibska manages to create imperceptible compositions of glass, “geometric spiders’ webs” on which light plays, crystallising like frost on a winter’s morning, revealing the Euclidean nature of the frozen water crystals. A play between the visible and invisible that leads to the absence of gravity and the lightness of her compositions. She works with space, time, light and occasionally does collages, photography, film, and jewelry design.