GLASSTRESS REFLEXIONS

Flowing drapery. The motif recurs throughout the history of art, from Classical Antiquity’s wet drapery that both veils and unveils the body, to the Baroque art of chiaroscuro, which uses the contrasts of light and dark, highlights and shading to accentuate surface and depth in sweeping swathes of fabrics. The body must be covered. Draperies sweep over genitalia in ceiling frescoes. Nature must be covered up.

In Karen LaMonte’s Reclining Nocturne 2, the underlying figure is revealed through expansive yet clinging drapery. The transparency of the glass further enhances this effect. A hard, yet fragile, material portrays gentle and flowing folds. Amid the sophisticated artistic draperies, we also find creases, the kind produced by a warm and moist human body. These creases suggest a humanity and presence. However, the lack of a body deceives the viewer. The invisible becomes visible.

The contradictions between hard and soft appear in Marie-Louise Ekman’s installation, which includes mutilated bodies of dogs laid out and carefully wrapped in soft, thin gauze. The nature of the glass, in combination with the textile elements, like the necklace-adorned Olympia, is reinforced in Ekman’s amputated paws and tails.

Art projected through different materials, precipitates a change in perception. Objects for everyday use, artefacts and art objects are viewed through these materials. In art, glass is one among many materials: stone, clay, plaster and metal. Glass adds expressive layers to the work of art, making it difficult to avoid its essence. 

The exhibition represents four decades of art from the Berengo Studios glassworks. The common denominator among the works of art is the material. The qualities of the glass are exploited and are subordinate. In Charles Avery’s slithering eels in Untitled (Ninth Stand #1), the seductive qualities of glass are manifested. The sleek and slippery quality of the eels is highlighted by the material. Avery’s eels are in various stages of their metamorphosis and are trapped in trays and plastic bins. Some of them stretch upward as if in an attempt to escape, while others appear paralysed. In Sweden, the eel has come to symbolise man’s destruction, similarly to the bees hovering serenely above our heads in Laure Provoust’s Trapped By Your Light. They are suspended around an alarming yellow bulb, burning close to destruction like Icarus, who, in arrogance, flies toward the sun. Nature is about to be destroyed by culture. In contrast, Antonio Riello’s burnt books in Ashes to Ashes can be perceived as the annihilation of man and his culture. Thirty-nine glass vessels hold the ashes of different literary works, such as The Idiot by Dostoevsky and Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. Annihilated and immortalised. It is tangibly painful.

Art can be projected through materials. In the glasstress concept, artistry is projected through Berengo Studios on the ancient island of Murano near Venice. Widely different artistic talents from all over the world, both established and less established artists, with varying points of departure, are revealed through glasstress, which provides the same conditions and thereby also the same starting point for them all. Expressions and techniques, forms and visions coexist within the same boundaries. 

Artists:
I utställningen visas verk av följande konstnärer: Ai Weiwei, Charles Avery, Ernst Billgren, María Magdalena Campo-Pons, Mat Collishaw, Tony Cragg, Jimmie Durham, Marie-Louise Ekman, Carlos Garaicoa, Kendell Geers, Josh Hershman, Ilya & Emilia Kabakov, Kiki Kogelnik, Jone Kvie, Karen LaMonte, Massimo Lunardon, Stefania Mazzola, Denise Milan, Vik Muniz, Hans Op de Beeck, Tony Oursler, Jaume Plensa, Laure Prouvost, Antonio Riello, Wael Shawky, Lino Tagliapietra, Thomas Schütte, Koen Vanmechelen, Fred Wilson, Rose Wylie och Erwin Wurm.

Mats Gustafson (b. 1951) began his career as an illustrator in the late 1970s. His elegant and subtly expressive watercolours and pastel works expanded the scope and possibilities of fashion illustration. His works reinvigorated the genre. Among his clients we find Hermès, Svenskt Tenn, Tiffany & Co. and Yohji Yamamoto. For the past ten years, Gustafson has primarily worked for the Dior Fashion House. 
Side by side with fashion illustration, his brush strokes have conjured up portraits: of people, stones, and swans. He turns his gaze repeatedly to the nature on Long Island in the U.S, where he has lived for 20 years. His work has recently been exhibited in the Nordic Watercolour Museum and CFHILL.
Ted Muehling (b. 1953) has designed jewellery and decorative objects inspired by organic forms in nature since 1976. In his New York City studio, he produces pieces using semi-precious stones, metals, pearls, horn, plastic and wood. Boxes, jewellery, vases, a mirror; often unique pieces, dedicated to a friend. Always with nature as a starting point. Avoiding the conventions and limitations of industrial design, he works on his own designs in an artisanal fashion, where time is not an obstacle and quantity is not a necessity.
The Gustafson and Muehling art shares a common language as they explore textures. The texture of fabrics, skin, shells, sand, stone and metals. Muehling’s cabinet of curiosities with collections of natural artefacts and ancient fossils, and Gustafson’s solitary watercolour stones and haute couture of rapid brush strokes, address the eternal questions of life’s transitory nature – memento mori.
The exhibition at Millesgården shows the two artists’ work side by side in a spirited environment – with antique portrait busts, Baroque furnishings and cabinets of curiosities filled with the wonders of nature. The curator is designer Tom Hedqvist (b. 1948).