Christopher Ries

Christopher Ries is a glass artist and sculptor. Born in 1952, he grew up on a farm in central Ohio. In 1971 he matriculated to The Ohio State University to pursue a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in ceramics. He soon became more interested in the glass used to glaze pottery than the pottery itself. In order to explore glass as a medium for artistic expression, he built what became the university's first glass studio and served as its first instructor. Ries spent the next several years blowing glass and investigating glass types, chemical compositions, and properties. During his senior year at Ohio State, Ries attended a guest lecture given by the founder of the American Glass Movement, Harvey Littleton. Littleton was struck by Ries's accomplishments as both a glass artist and teacher, and asked Ries to become his research assistant at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Ries accepted the offer and enrolled at the institute the following autumn. Ries spent the next two years under the mentorship of Littleton. Ries's interest in glass's optical properties grew and began carving cold glass instead of blowing hot glass. Tools to sculpt large blocks of glass weren't available at the time, so Ries independently developed much of the equipment he needed during his spare time. He received his Master of Fine Art from The University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1978. After a few years of experimentation with glassblowing, he discovered his true direction in working with clear, optical glass.

While in graduate school, Ries ran a glass blowing studio for two summers at Mineral Point, Wisconsin. Ries opened a studio at 70 N. Monroe Avenue in Columbus, Ohio after graduate school and developed his cold working skills and understanding of optics. It was in 1979 that Ries made an effort to find the ultimate glass sculpting material. His search led him to Schott Optical in Duryea, Pennsylvania. Ries experimented with many glass types produced at Schott over the next few years in his Columbus, Ohio studio. In 1986 Ries had earned the respect of Schott's President, Dr. Franz Herkt, and was offered studio space at the Pennsylvania factory. Mr. Ries has been a non-paid, independent contractor there ever since, with the title Artist-in-Residence.

Unlike most glass artists, Christopher Ries neither blows nor laminates glass. Rather, he works in the traditional reductive sculptural mode, starting with a block of solid optical glass and reducing it to his desired form. His luminous art glass sculpture is characterized by its technical perfection and the seemingly magical, ever changing optical patterns within them. His sculptures range from a few inches high to life-size. Ries's “Opus” was at the time of its creation the world's largest monolithic glass sculpture. It weighs nearly 1,500 pounds and was sculpted from a 3,000-pound block of glass. His largest cast glass sculpture is entitled “Sunflower” and, unlike most of Ries’s glass art which is clear, “Sunflower” has a beautiful colorful image embedded in clear optical glass. The 1,100-pound “Sunflower IV” took four months to anneal and required a further 1,800 estimated hours to carve. Some of the most popular art series by Ries are Desert Flower, Embrace, Solstice and Celebration. Some of his works are the largest, whole, unassembled pieces of sculpted crystal known. The art of Ries is deceptively simple in form but complex in expression as it engages each viewer in an ever-changing intimate world of images.

Ries himself characterizes his work as a “vessel for light,” noting that “all that we know about the universe, the composition of the stars, and the distances within the universe is studied through light...It is the one medium that gathers, focuses, amplifies, transmits, filters, diffuses and reflects it. It is the quintessential medium for light. I see it all on a symbolic level.”

Ries's works have won numerous awards and are exhibited in major collections and museums throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan, including the Corning Museum of Glass, the Cincinnati Art Museum, the National Heisey Glass Museum, the National Liberty Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Tampa Museum of Art.