Danny Lane

Danny Lane (born 27 January 1955) is an American artist, best known for his glass and steel sculpture. Lane is also known for his work in art furniture and contemporary design. He lives and works in London.

Lane came to attention in the 1980s through his art furniture. He moved into large-scale public sculpture in the 1990s, being responsible in 2006 for Borealis, believed to be the largest glass sculpture in the world. Lane's work can be found in public spaces and collections worldwide, such as London Underground, Canary Wharf Plc, Victoria & Albert Museum, Microsoft, British Land Plc, Rolex UK, British Airports Authority, Swire Properties (Hong Kong) and General Motors (USA).

To construct his glass sculptures, Lane exploits the strength of glass under compression and its qualities of luminosity. This approach expands on traditional methods of glass and metal smithing and has resulted in a varied body of work, from monumental structures made from industrial float glass and steel, to coloured glass sculpture, casts and design objects.

Life and career Education and early work Lane was born in 1955 in Urbana, Illinois, in the United States. During his childhood, his family moved many times, from Virginia to West Germany, New York City’s Greenwich Village and finally Baltimore. Travelling through Europe exposed Lane to a wide range of art and architecture.

Reyntiens recommended Lane to the Central School of Art & Design, London, where he trained as a painter under artist Cecil Collins, whose personal philosophy and method of teaching influenced Lane's own creative development.

1980s and design objects

Though now well known for his large-scale public artworks, Lane was first known in the 1980s for the construction of his design objects and art furniture. Lane then began developing objects using industrial float glass, and by the mid-1980s he was experimenting with assemblage, uniting found materials in his furniture. During these early years, he developed a series of editioned works and by the end of the 1980s, Lane had exhibited work at solo shows in London, Paris and Milan. Lane's first public commissions occurred in the late 1980s, including Stacked Glass Fountain (1986) in Miami, Florida and etched glass screens and a wall sculpture for the British Embassy in Helsinki in 1989, both of which contained elements that provided the basis for later work.

From 1989 to 1990, Lane travelled to Tokyo and Osaka in Japan to produce new commissions. Further work followed during 1991-93 across China, Spain and London and Edinburgh in the United Kingdom, including Wave Wall (1993) for Dalian Glass Company, China, which saw Lane experimenting with curving glass walls that refract light.

In 1994, Lane was commissioned by the Victoria & Albert Museum, London to create a glass balustrade for their new Glass Gallery. The balustrade is made up of 140 pillars of cut glass, lining the stairs leading to a glass mezzanine floor

In 1996, the steel and glass sculpture Man Catching A Star was commissioned for the Wembley Stadium approach in London. More public sculptures followed over subsequent years, including glass water sculptures in China and India, Pantheon for Henley Festival in 2000 and The Presence of Seven (2002) in Meadville, Pennsylvania.

In 2003, Lane made Parting of the Waves for Canary Wharf Plc, East London. The work is a 4m high, 10m long ribbon of glass running each side of the north entrance. It was constructed from 2000 narrow strips of glass, which are locked into place by their own weight.

The following year in 2004, Opening Line, a 90-m long public sculpture, was created for the Gateshead public transport interchange, Nexus at Gateshead, Tyne and Wear. The work contains multiple references to the local culture and history of Gateshead, such as engineering and maritime culture.

2005 saw further public sculptures produced including Assembly Field at the National Assembly for Wales in Cardiff and Stairway, for Cass Sculpture Foundation in the UK. Stairway is a glass and steel construction that rises up into the sky with no landing platform, designed to be reminiscent of Jacob's Ladder.

In May 2006, Lane produced Borealis for the General Motors Renaissance Center in Detroit, USA, which is believed to be the largest glass sculpture in existence. The work was inspired by the Aurora Borealis, a spectacle that Lane references in the refraction of light through the numerous strips of glass.

Colour Eclipse was made in 2009 for Bishopsgate's Broadgate Tower in London, one of many coloured glass works created in this period using furnace technology. Other coloured glass works such as Blue Moon demonstrated this method on a smaller scale.

In recent years, Aether (2013) was produced for the window of Marble Arch House, London, commissioned by British Land Plc.

Steel work

When first working with metal, Lane did not have his own forge or know how to weld, yet his interest in this process resulted in several pieces early in his career. Lane cites the origin of his interest in steel as his admiration for the work of Antoni Gaudi, and especially the work of Josep Maria Jujol at Gaudí's Casa Milà in Barcelona.

Early in his career, Lane produced RSJ Table (1985). Moscow Bar, designed the following year in 1986 with Simon Holbrook, was an interior installation, comprising bar, tables and chairs for the Moscow Club on Soho's Frith Street, London.

The late 1980s saw Lane shift into large-scale metal work. Lane developed methods of heating steel, making it possible to bend metal freely into what he calls "steel drawings," which are produced to function much like industrial-scale automatic drawings. An example of this work is Saddle (2006), in which a twisted metallic ribbon supports a glass tabletop.

These ‘carved casts’ were influenced by Lane's admiration for ancient traditions of stone carving and classical sculpture relief. This is achieved by threading a steel rod through layered glass. His Stacking Chair (1986) was the first demonstration of this technique, now in the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. He works intuitively, conscious of maintaining elements of accident and chance in his work.

Personal life Danny Lane lives in Maida Vale, West London. His father, M. Daniel Lane, was a scientist and his mother was an art historian and environmentalist. He has two children, Lauren and Joseph.