"In his elegant yet strangely disturbing series of Persians, Dale Chihuly courts the miraculous," writes Robert Hobbs in his essay "Dale Chihuly's Persians: Acts of Survival" in the catalog accompanying the 1988 exhibition curated by Henry Geldzahler for the Dia Art Foundation on Long Island. Hobbs suggests that the series alludes to the "romance of ancient Persia, which Iran's new Islamic Republic is now rejecting". The deaths of his father and only brother within 18 months of each other "impressed upon him the precariousness of life," and Hobbs sees this expressed in the Persians that give "voice to the accidental and serendipitous nature of life." The traveling exhibition traced the development of the series from the first peculiarly shaped forms with their irregular surface designs to the sophisticated and exotically patterned mature works. Reproductions of Chihuly's glass and drawings and images of the artist at work with his team along with statements by the artist illuminate the evolution of this series first shown in the Louvre. 1986 Softcover, 8" x 8" 32 pages, 24 color reproductions ISBN 0-9608382-8-7
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