Anna Orlina carves her own path in glass art
Ten years into mastering her medium, Anna Orlina emerges from a monumental artistic shadow with “Reflections of Being” at Galerie Stephanie, a debut solo exhibition that marks both a personal milestone and a distinct stylistic departure.
As an inheritor of the Orlina glass legacy, Anna crafts a visual language that is unmistakably her own — playful yet rigorous, lucent, and grounded in a contemplative exploration of femininity, family, faith, and selfhood.
Her sculptures rely on a modular, hands-on assembly — a process she likens to assembling Legos — where laminated coldworked glass, upcycled scraps, and faceted blocks are built into recognizable, highly structured forms. Rather than carving away at monolithic blocks, she constructs scaffolded architectures that dwell at the midpoint between representation and abstraction.
Her palette also signals a deliberate shift. While not as heavily saturated or bold as her father’s signature green and monochromatic tones, Anna’s works boast a delicate, expanded chromatic variety. Pieces like “Pink Lantern” and “Faith in Light” showcase nuanced, multi-hued light refractions, while “Shared Reflections” integrates opals and borosilicate glass into brilliant blue-violet geometric matrices. This expanded spectrum creates a lightly psychedelic, shifting radiance as light moves through her faceted planes.
The show’s crowning achievement is “MARIposa” (2026), a piece that brilliantly encapsulates her artistic identity. Shaped like a butterfly (“mariposa” is Filipino for butterfly), the sculpture balances the inherent fragility and ephemeral beauty of its subject with a gradient rainbow hue ranging from deep blues and cyans to radiant yellows and reds. “MARIposa” merges the translucent firmness and scintillating brilliance of coldworked glass with an intimate, organic warmth.
Other works, such as “Kebaya” — a stylized female torso — and “Ascent,” a pagoda-like structure, further demonstrate her ability to imbue hard, unforgiving glass with tactile rhythm and personal narrative.
Ultimately, “Reflections of Being” is more than a display of technical mastery over cutting, grinding, and laminating glass. It functions, as Anna intends, as a mirror. By allowing light and shadow to cast themselves back at the spectator, her luminous sculptures invite viewers to reflect on their own lives through the quiet, radiant brilliance of her emerging craft.
