"VENICE — Glass has unique illusionistic possibilities, making it, in theory, an ideal medium for artistic expression. Yet modern artists have experimented with it only intermittently. However, as two exhibitions in Venice reveal, glass is now being taken up by an increasingly wide spectrum of contemporary artists.
In 1972, glass ceased to have its own section at the Venice Biennale, when the inclusion of what were considered “decorative arts” was abandoned. But at this year’s event, glass has made a comeback in two separate shows: “Glasstress,” an official parallel exhibition at Palazzo Cavalli Franchetti on the Grand Canal, and “Fa come natura face in foco,” which borrows a line from Dante’s Divine Comedy (“Do as nature does in the flame”) to evoke the fiery glass furnaces of Murano, at the Padiglione Venezia in the Biennale’s Castello Gardens (both until Nov. 22).
[...]
In 1971, Duchamp’s cones, an element in “Large Glass,” inspired Richard Hamilton’s “Sieves (with Marcel Duchamp),” in which the artist creates the appearance of conical objects arching freely through the air by painting them on a plate of glass barely visible from a distance.
Hamilton’s piece is one of a number of works in “Glasstress” that use glass to play with our perceptions of reality, posing some entertaining and thought-provoking conceptual conundrums.
[...]
Robert Rauschenberg’s “Untitled” (1971), a pair of clear blown-glass car tires, represents an amusing departure from his usual modus operandi. Rauschenberg’s sculptures were typically constructed out of scrap metal and found objects from junkyards (of the kind featured in the current “Gluts” show at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection on the other side of the Grand Canal from Palazzo Cavalli Franchetti). But these tires have an almost ghostly, dreamlike unreality.
Ms. Peabody’s “My Sidewalk” (2009), a mysterious, occluded narrative installation, is composed of paving stones made of mirrors on which she has engraved images of childhood objects and memories — a comb, a teddy bear, a manhole cover. But the last paving stone is shattered to fragments, suggesting perhaps dissolution and broken hopes. Mona Hatoum in her “Nature Morte aux Grenades” (2006-7) has covered a table with what from a distance look like rather cheerful colored-glass ornaments, but which on closer inspection turn out to be hand grenades.
Bizarre, esoteric, but curiously engaging: that describes the South Korean artist Hye Rim Lee’s “Crystal City Spun,” a 3-D video animation, where glass objects and their reflections are perfectly digitally crafted, but entirely illusory. The balletic performance they put on, to pulsing music, features Toki, a pirouetting dancer in vertiginous stiletto heels with an impossibly pneumatic figure; and a friendly dragon, backed by a spinning chorus of bouncing pink glass rabbits, vibrators and other phallic sex aids.
[...]
Visitors to “Fa come natura face in foco” at the Padiglione Venezia are greeted by Dale Chihuly’s flamboyantly colorful “Mille Fiori Venezia,” an open-air installation of weird and wonderful forms, made up of around 500 individual pieces of glass. In a side room off the main gallery is a display of groundbreaking historic objects by some of the most innovative glass artists of the first half of the 20th century, notably Vittorio Zecchin, Napoleone Martinuzzi, Carlo Scarpa and Ercole Barovier.
Outstanding among the new exhibits in the main pavilion show are those by Yoichi Ohira. [...] In his “Submerged Crystal” series here, which he describes as “sunk vases in thick clear crystal,” he creates intriguing impressions of one vessel suspended in another, an ethereal illusion of precarious equilibrium that could only be created in glass.
Fa come natura face in foco. Padiglione Venezia, Castello Gardens, Venice. Through Nov. 22."Excerpted From:
Morris, R.C. "Contemporary Reflections in Glass." August 7, 2009. The New York Times. website accessed August 9, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/08/arts/08iht-biennale.html
No comments:
Post a Comment