Kreg Kallenberger

Kreg Kallenberger is a landscape illusionist and painter that uses glass as his medium. He received a bachelor’s and master’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Oklahoma before his career switched to art. In 1972, while working on his graduate degree in ceramics, he became interested in glass. After graduation he established the school’s first glass studio and taught courses in that subject for several years.

Kallenberger uses lead crystal for his work. It provides the optical quality that after being sandblasted, polished, stained and otherwise modified yields a remarkable refractive and reflective ability to cast images upward into the viewer’s eyes as if by magic, depending upon the viewer’s perspective. The painted “landscapes” at the base of a glass wedge seem to flash on and off according to the position of the viewer.

The evolution of Kallenberger's work is as strong an example as any of the impact of circumstances and surroundings on an artist's work. With the move of his studio to the edge of the Osage Hills, his sculpture radically changed. The Osage Hills of Oklahoma stretch north and west of Tulsa looking much the same as they did a century ago. The landscape theme, which has dominated much of Kallenberger's recent work, was inspired by his immediate surroundings. In his works, Kallenberger shares a real kinship with the 19th century painters of the Hudson River School, who expressed a belief in something wondrously vital within the uncontaminated landscape, which not only resists man but imbues him with its spirit. Through the medium of glass, he has carried the manipulation of imagery with light to its ultimate degree.

Kallenberger has received international acclaim for his sculpture over the decades. Additionally, he been honored with numerous awards, among them the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1984. His work has been widely exhibited and published and is represented in dozens of museum collections, including the Corning Museum of Glass, the Museum of Fine Arts-Boston, the Detroit Institute of Art, the Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art, the Musee de Arts Decoratifs - Lausanne, the American Craft Museum - New York, and the High Museum- Atlanta.