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An exhibition in Versailles titled "Le Verre" showcases how contemporary artists are innovating ways of working with glass.
From Marc Chagall's stained-glass windows at Reims cathedral to Thomas Schütte's architectural installation in Trafalgar Square, glass has revealed itself to be an inspiring material for artists.
Some of today's leading artists and architects are innovating the ways of working with glass. Two years ago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) organized a major group show, "Glass: Material Matters," which explored how 64 artists, including the likes of Tony Cragg, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Sherrie Levine, Larry Bell, Renzo Piano and Kiki Smith, who have been employing glass in sculpture, conceptual art and architecture. The exhibition assembled over 100 works produced from the mid-1980s up to the present, half of which were drawn from the museum's own collection. It underscored how the versatile use of glass extends far beyond decorative objects.
This spring, a smaller exhibition in Versailles titled "Le Verre" showcases a variety of works made by seven contemporary artists, each pursuing differing techniques engaging the transparency and sheerness of glass. What emerges is how some of them use glass, which is made from sand and other minerals, in experimental ways and emphasize its magical plays on light.
Josepha Gasch-Muche creates mesmerizing "wall objects" in geometric forms like circles, squares or triangles in addition to cubic sculptures composed of thousands of glass fragments. She orders extremely thin sheets of glass from a factory and breaks them into tiny pieces with pliers, then arranges them over each other to create three-dimensional shapes suggesting a spiraling or whirling optical effect. Up close, the shapes appear to veer in and out of focus, just as how some parts of daguerreotypes are in sharp relief while others are blurred. "Glass is a material that makes it possible to paint with light," says the German artist. "If you stand and move before the object, you have the impression that the 3-D surface is changing – this means that you cannot really photograph my works, as they look different depending on your position. It creates a very physical experience."
Light, time and space are the three factors that the Polish-born, US-based artist Anna Skibska seeks to encapsulate in her large-scale glass sculptures. "I'm a sculptor, not a glass artist," she asserts. "I use glass but I don't worship it." From a factory, Skibska orders rods and strips of glass rods, which she stretches and twists. After making preliminary sketches for her sculptures, she erects "scaffolding" within which she builds her pieces, evoking trees, buildings or bodies. "Hans Holbein used silver points to draw and leave very specific marks on paper," says Skibska, who studied painting, architecture and graphic arts. "When I saw the silver line of the edges of glass, it made me think of a kind of three-dimensional point, and that is how I started."
In contrast, the French duo Perrin & Perrin – Martine and Jacki Perrin – have adopted their own process for creating glass sculptures, "build-in-glass," consisting of an engraved matrix system. "At first, we tried to control something that the glass-blowers don't like, which is the bubbles," says Martine Perrin. "We printed planks of glass like wood engravings so we could control the bubbles of glass and then created a fine matrix formed like bricks." The latest works to result from their hand-crafted approach are five hollow, irregularly-shaped circular sculptures in turquoise with black markings.
Other artists, such as Isabelle Monod – whose work is also included in the "Le Verre" exhibition – employ the traditional technique of glass-blowing and -fusing to create delicate, transparent cubic works. Some of her cubes are composed of 16 small blocks that contain fine, colorful, abstract shapes inside.
For centuries, the passion for glass has extended to architecture, as exemplified by Philip Johnson's Glass House, completed in 1949, through to contemporary projects by the likes of SANAA and Toyo Ito. The subtlety and lack of arrogance of glass, due to its transparency and translucency, have enabled architects to design unobtrusive buildings that can blend with a landscape rather than dominate it. For instance, Piano is building a slender glass skyscraper called the London Bridge Tower that will soar more than 1,000 feet high, making it the tallest building in Europe when it is completed in 2009. Its design is based on the historic form of London's masts and towers. "Symbols are dangerous, and tall buildings are often aggressive and arrogant symbols of power and ego, and are selfish and hermetic," says the architect. "The Shard is designed to be a sharp and light presence in the London skyline."
Across art and architecture, glass – despite being very commonplace – can be manipulated as an endlessly exotic material that can assume an extraordinary range of physical properties and appearances.