- A view from the installation “Life in the Gardens. Fräbel Glass at Phipps.”
After the success of the 2007 exhibition “Chihuly at Phipps: Gardens & Glass,” the Pittsburgh botanical garden has invited another glass artist to install sculpture in and around its horticultural displays and greenhouses.
Hans Godo Fräbel, a German-born flameworker who pioneered the sculptural use of borosillicate glass in the 1960s, will install nearly 200 of his whimsical sculptures, which range from geometric shapes to his elongated figures known as “Longfellows” among the exotic plants. The exhibition will open on May 20, 2009, and run through January 2010.
This will not be the first botanical installation for Fräbel, whose work was featured in smaller exhibitions at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens in Atlanta, Georgia, in 2007, and at the McKee Botanical Gardens in Vero Beach, Florda, in 2008.