Heller Gallery is pleased to present Air Craft, our first solo exhibition of work by award-winning artist Matthew Szösz. The exhibition focuses on pieces from Szösz’s Inflatables series, low-tension structures constructed at high temperatures with fused sheet glass and compressed air that push the boundaries of form.

Experimentation, a pathfinding interaction with material-driven process and an unmitigated quest for exploration drive the work of this artist and educator. Szösz describes himself as “the child of two ideas. The first is the unreconstructed artisanship tradition in which I was raised. The second is the church of ecstatic blue-collar Rock & Roll anarchy for which I volunteered. This is the territory that excites me—lying between the sensitive and considered restraint of learned technique and the manic populist energy of the rock-throwing iconoclast, described by an urgent elliptical oscillation between the two.”

Matthew Szösz received his BA (1996) & BID (1997) and his MFA (Glass) (2007) from Rhode Island School of Design. He has been recognized internationally with awards including the Irvine Borowsky Prize, the Jutta-Cuny Franz Prize, and a Tiffany Foundation Grant, and has completed numerous residencies in the US, Europe, Asia and Australia. Szösz has taught in the USA at Virginia Commonwealth University, University of Washington, University of Hawai’i, Pilchuck Glass School, Penland School of Crafts and internationally at ASP Wrøcław, Amsterdam’s Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Bildwerk Frauenau and others, and has lectured and led workshops around the world.

He is the founding member of the curatorial group Hyperopia Projects and was Executive Director of Public Glass, a non-profit public access studio in San Francisco. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is represented in private collections and public institutions in the United States, Australia, Europe & Japan including at the Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, NY, the Renwick Gallery/Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, the Toyama City Museum of Glass, Toyama, Japan and Het Glazenhuis, Lommel, Belgium.