The exhibition Meetings features works in several materials, including sculptures in glass, bronze, and aluminum, as well as pastel and charcoal drawings. Central to Wolff's artistry is her interest in humanity, and some of the themes highlighted in the exhibited works are questions of identity, of the self and the female experience.

Anneliese Schaefer (later Ann Wolff) was born in Lübeck in 1937 and from 1956-59 studied visual communication at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, Germany. In 1960, she moved to Sweden and began a successful career as a designer, first at the Pukeberg glassworks and then at Kosta (today Kosta Boda). In 1973, Ann designed the famous and highly regarded Snowball candlestick for Kosta. She left the glassworks in 1978 and then became a co-creator of the first Glass Studio in Småland, Stenhytta in Transjö. After her time at the glassworks, Wolff began working with drawing and painting, and from 1989 began an extensive work with collages in glass and later also with sculptures in cast glass. In addition to glass, she has also made sculptures in bronze, aluminium, concrete and nickel silver. In recent years, Wolff has also worked with photography and embroidery, which she performs on her earlier drawings and giclées.

Wolff has an investigative approach to the inherent expressive possibilities of materials, especially when it comes to glass, but also in her artistic practice in general. In the glass sculptures, the relationship between light and space is important parameters – without its demarcation, its space and the light, glass is nothing. There are thus two sides to the existence of glass – it exists, and it does not exist. Duality often plays an important role in Ann’s work, and many of the glass sculptures have a positive and negative side.

Ann Wolff has been noticed both nationally and internationally, especially for her unique glass sculptures. With several prizes and prestigious awards for her sculptural works in glass, she has positioned herself on the art scene and has exhibited regularly in museums and galleries, including Denmark, Germany, France, the USA and Japan. Wolff is represented at a large number of international museums, and also in Sweden at, among others, the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, Röhsska in Gothenburg and Värmlands Museum in Karlstad. Visby Cathedral owns a work by Ann Wolff – an angel in cast glass, Solo, 2011, which is permanently placed on the pulpit in the church.

Cologne Suite

In the late 1980s, Ann Wolff felt that she had had enough of glass and expressed: “I can’t stand the fact that glass is so beautiful. So seductive and sparklingly beautiful that it hides my art. I don’t want to compete with glass anymore. I have a longing to experience art. Understand what art is.”

In 1989, Ann Wolff went to the then flourishing art metropolis of Cologne to get away from Sweden and everything that glass meant and with the intention of exploring herself as an artist. From Cologne, she went to Wuppertal and sought out the well-known, and for experimental dance so influential, choreographer and dancer Pina Bausch and her dance theatre. Bausch mixed dance, theatre, and music in a kind of collage based on emotions, both in wild and tender everyday situations. She worked in an investigative manner and asked the dancers questions, who, through dance, were able to seek answers and expression based on their own experiences and feelings. Bausch is said to have said: “I am not interested in how people move, but in what moves them.” This was in line with Ann’s approach to her artistic career, and she was given the opportunity to sit in on the rehearsals and draw. She carefully studied the dancers’ gestures and made numerous sketches that she then transformed into powerful and emotional charcoal drawings. The work shown here is one of many from the Cologne Suite.

“I was really captivated by the gesture. It dawned on me that everyone has their own gestures, the whole body makes a gesture.” In Cologne she also found her own gesture; she became an artist!

Read more about Cologne Suite here.

Needlework

“My needlework on paper started with the series of transformed giclées: LIEBE MUTTI 2019. At my mothers generation women used to meet at home to work with needleand thread. They inspired each other by signing their stock of handkerchiefs, towels and sheets. Looking back, I would like to honor this generation of mothers and their material.“

Behind the Mask, 2013–18
  

Next to the church visitors, we have placed a row of motifs of different individuals – or perhaps these could be seen as variations of the same person? A person has so many faces, so many selves. Ann Wolff has painted many portraits/self-portraits, perhaps in an attempt to find herself, her own voice and her own expression as an artist. Ann paints quickly without erasing or painting over – the original and random are important elements in her artistic creation.

The seven pastels are part of the series Behind the Mask and are about duality – about the relationship between the inner authentic self and external expectations. Many of the portraits, both consciously and unconsciously, resemble herself. Through the portraits, she can view herself from the outside. Ann expresses this as: “I as the other”. She goes on to say about her portraits: “They [the drawings] were quite ridiculous at times. Quite funny at times. Quite ugly at times. And quite different. But I accepted this. When the drawings were next to each other, I understood that they were my own masks that I had drawn.”

Read more about Behind the Mask here

Corvus  

Bronze

Black matters
The raven and crows
The raven carries the deepest black.
His movement between heaven and ground makes
humans all over the world give him special powers,
saying: “he’s been visiting the universe and came
back to tell us about it.”

The raven is both demurge and trickster, both hero
and villain, often at the same time. In almost every
creation myth in the region, the raven is either the
actual creator of the world or plays a significant role
in creation. The raven appears in several forms. In
Northwest Coast Indian mythology, animals can easily
assume human form and live like humans – with
the raven being their most excellent modifier, able to
transform into anything to get what it wants.

Read about The Crow here