Ado by Davide Salvadore

 There's a new gallery in town, and it's creating quite a buzz. Ever since the Litvak Gallery, a private gallery the size of a small museum, opened in December 2009 in the Museum Tower right behind the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, it's been attracting hoards of visitors (more than 12,000 so far)  to its display of world-class glass studio art – and justifiably so.

Israelis have had a fondness for glass art ever since the hugely popular installation exhibition of sinuous glass sculptures by Dale Chihuly at David's Tower in Jerusalem 10 years ago which made Chihuly's name pretty much a household word in Israel. But as the opening exhibition at the Litvak Gallery, "Contemporary Trends in Glass" makes clear, Chihuly is just one of many innovative contemporary studio glass artists around the world who have taken the medium of glass to astonishing levels.

The exhibition features the works of 23 glass artists (including Chihuly, who has eight works on show) from Italy, Sweden, Czech republic, Germany, the US and Poland. On the day I visited, queues had formed by opening hour (in spite of a rather stiff admission fee) and amazed crowds had gathered around some of the more eye-popping works, such as Lucio Bubacco's " Eternal Temptation" which has been accorded a small room of its own, separated from the main space by a black curtain over which a guard keeps watch.

This remarkable assemblage includes hundreds of tiny figures on the themes of heaven and hell, replete with biblical, mythological, literary and even DNA references. In its center is a sculpture of a boat pulled one way by the devil and the other way by an angel, with a human figure, perhaps Bubacco himself, in the middle. Technically staggering, it is bizarre but beautiful, as if Milton or Dante had been translated to the medium of glass.

Balancing the florid baroque styles of Bubacco and Chihuly are minimalist works by such artists as Joey Kirkpatrick and Flora Mace, Americans who create still life three-dimensional fruits and vegetables; the Prague artist Vaclav Cigler, who cuts solid pieces of lead crystal and optical glass into prismatic shapes; and Howard Ben Tre, who casts massive forms and installations from molds, among many others. In fact, the variety of forms that glass can take and the level of invention and creativity expressed by artists in glass are perhaps the most interesting things about this gallery.

Glass can be used to produce sculptures or flat, two-dimensional works such as stained glass. It can be blown, molded, cast, fused or beaded, producing entirely different effects. The craft has become very popular in recent decades, but it has a venerable history, going all the way back to ancient Egypt and Assyria. The Phoenicians invented glassblowing, which was further developed by the Romans and examples of great glass art can be seen in European cathedral stained glass windows, in Venetian glass from Murano, and more recently, in works by Tiffany, Lalique, Daum and Gallé. 

The Litvak Gallery is owned by Muly Litvak, a glass collector and internet entrepreneur whose fortune is said to derive from adult content online support and maintenance services. His stated aim is to commission and sell studio glass art and to introduce the works of some of the world's best glass artists to a wider public –  at prices in keeping with international standards, of course. Should you wish to purchase one of the works, you could expect to pay from $1000 up to hundreds of thousands of dollars – something that I was told many Israelis have already been happy to do.

In order to see them at their best, the 850 sq meter space designed by Asaf Guttesman features sophisticated lighting options and angular walls. There is another private exhibition and office space for clients on a higher floor, with a spectacular view of Tel Aviv, which I was lucky enough to see.

What the exhibition shows is that glass art is astonishingly varied in method, style and result. In a word – wow.

The Litvak Gallery is located in the Museum Tower, 4 Berkovitz Street in Tel Aviv, tel: 03 695 9496.  It is open Mondays and Tuesdays from 10 am to 8 pm; Wednesdays from 12 noon to 9 pm; Thursdays from 10 am to 9 pm; Fridays from 9 am to 3 pm; Saturdays from 6 pm to 11 pm. The gallery can also be seen on YouTube.