For over forty years, Barbara Nanning has been an internationally renowned artist with works in numerous public and private collections around the world. Describing herself as a ‘three dimensional designer’, the dutch artist quickly gained worldwide recognition for her unique vessels and sculptures.

Nanning started out her career as a ceramicist, after graduating from the renowned Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. She introduced to the medium vivid colours that had only previously been possible in painting and gave an unexpected, almost unreal dimension to her work. Nevertheless, Nanning soon took the surprising step of adding glass to her repertoire — the material on which she would eventually focus exclusively. Experimenting with pate de verre, glass blowing, and metal gliding, she fuses different worlds into an entirely personal visual language.

Nature, both organic and inorganic, is a constant source of inspiration for Nanning. She studies multifaceted crystals, soft jellyfishes, flowers and micro-organisms built up of regular components, with a well-nigh nineteenth-century fascination with form, structure and geometry. Her constant thirst for new challenges has led Nanning to Novy Bor in the Czech Republic, where she enjoys the support of the most talented glassblowers and polishers, but above all the possibility of employing colour in a totally new way. In Novy Bor, she has lobed forms blown, which are then sawn up, ground and polished.

Barbara Nanning thus combines tradition with innovation, Eastern opulence with Dutch austereness, freedom with structure and reason with emotion. Her work is an interesting mix of unequal quantities without becoming complex; a fusion of carefully chosen and at times seemingly contradictory elements. Her language does not comply with the existing one, but breaks new ground and forms a universe all of its own.