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Critic's Comments about Rene Culler

"Baroque excess also stands Rene Culler in good stead with her towers of cups, inspired by the tarot. The cups are first blown, then stacked and invested in mold material for fusing into a whole. They look like a ruin-a la Dicken's Miss Haversham and are completely enchanting." - Karen Chambers for Vetro, Venice Italy

"The oversized, nested glass bowls and goblets of Rene Culler...are playful, assertive, raw and robust in a way that makes them more than decorative craft objects and elevates them into the realm of sculpture." - Steven Litt, the Cleveland Plain Dealer

"Rene Culler takes a traditional medium and turns it on its head. Here is medium is glass, a material often associated with delicacy, preciousness, and decorative art. Culler's work is big, bold... - Kay Koeninger, The Columbus Dispatch

"Thank you for bringing Hot Blooded to the Renwick Gallery. The piece is quite spectacular and is a substantial addition to the museum's studio glass collection." - Kenneth R. Trapp, Curator-in-Charge, the Renwick Gallery, the American Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution

"Rene Culler's Les Fleurs de Mal, a set of stunning glass sculpture that seems to echo the 1861 poem by Charles Baudelaire, who also is said to have penned the advice: "You must shock the bourgeois." - Dorothy Shinn, the Akron Beacon Journal

"Culler is in the forefront of a new generation of studio glass artists advancing the medium into formal sculpture... The result is a play of opposites: weighty works that seem light because they're translucent; simple components merged into complex eye-catching forms, and organic forms that look like nothing on this earth." - Sally Vallongo, the Toledo Blade

"There are several works of surpassing beauty in the show, which is not to say they lack content...For example, Culler's works in this exhibit are from her Grail Variations series in which she explores the question, "Was the Holy Grail made from glass?"... Culler's works are sensual, complex, and layered, both literally and figuratively." - Dorothy Shinn, the Akron Beacon Journal

"The work of Rene Culler...shows that (she is an) artist of great and obvious dexterity, skill, technique, versatility and most of all ideas. Culler explores her inner life through her fused glass, which has layers of meaning that beg to be peeled away by the viewer." - Jeremy Ehrenreich, the Corning Leader