Carroña Javier Pérez, 2011, Murano glass chandelier, stuffed crows Photo: Francesco Allegretto, Courtesy of Venice Projects, Venice

For those who missed the exhibition of Glasstress at the Venice Biennale, the show has been migrated to Museum of Art and Design in New York, which is showcasing many of the glass sculptures created in Murano at the studio of Adriano Berengo.

Barengo founded the project originally as a way to engage international artists, inviting them to work with glass artisans in his factory in Venice. Many of the artists had never experimented before in this fragile medium, resulting in unusual and non-traditional artworks. The show includes works by Tony Oursler, Mike + Doug Starn, Kiki Smith and Patricia Urquiola as well as artists well-known for their glassworks like Luke Jerram and Dale Chihuly.

E. Coli Luke Jerram, 2010 Photo: Luke Jerram, Courtesy of De Nul Collection, Belgium

Shitting Doves of Peace and Flying Rats Jan Fabre Photo: Attilio Maranzano, Courtesy of Berengo Private Collection, Venice

The Seed of Narcissus Tomáš Libertiny, 2011, Mirrored glass, beeswax Photo: Francesco Allegretto, Courtesy of the artist and Venice Projects, Venice

Clifford Rainey, "War Boy - Job No. 1," 2006. Glass, inert ammunition, iron wire, oxides, pins, maple plinth. From Playing With Fire 50 Years of Contemporary Glass Exhibition Photo: Lee Fartheree. Photo: Jennifer Scanlan

Hang - by Charlotte Gyllenhammar at the Glasstress Exhibition in the 54th venice biennale.

Some of the more bolder, extravagant works made of glass seem to defy the medium’s inherent vulnerability, but glassworks are also coveted for this very same property of impermanence. A testament to their preciousness is that many exquisitely detailed ancient glassworks, several thousand years old, still remain intact to this day. To showcase this trend for innovations in glass, many museums around the world have been dedicated to glassworks alone like the recently opened single-focus Shanghai Glass Museum.

Dale Chihuly’s works will be exhbited in the specially designed Chihuly Garden and Glass building in Seattle, Washington scheduled to open Spring 2012, and another exhibition on the last 50 year history of glass, “Playing with Fire,” will open later in 2012 at MAD in NY.

© Copyright diephotodesigner.de Shanghai Museum of Glass

Chihuly Garden and Glass Groundbreaking Ceremony August 23, 2011. Seattle, Washington Opens Spring 2012

More information: Glasstress.org
Shanghai Glass Museum
Glasstress at MAD, Museum of Art and Design, New York – February 14 – June 10, 2012 www.madmuseum.org and “Playing with Fire” upcoming exhibition opens November 6th, 2012, and will run until April 7th, 2013.

Glasstress: © Jaume Plensa, Glassman, 2004

Glasstress is an arts project that sponsors and exhibits artists, architects, designers working in the medium of glass – The exhibition in Venice was conceived by Adriano Berengo of the Berengo Centre for Contemporary Art and Glass, and produced by Venice Projects and the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) of New York, who will be hosting the exhibition at a future date.

Works were exhibited by artists Jaume Plensa, Vik Muniz, Nabil Nahas, Kiki Smith, Doug and Mike Starn, Pharrell Williams, Zaha Hadid (whose work was not completed in time) and Erwin Wurm among many others. Plensa’s glass body above with its blood red fluid is a reminder of the flow of gravity after death.

Installation View at Glasstress Venice 2011

© Pharrell Williams - Glasstress

© Patricia Urquiola Glasstress 2011

© Luke Jerram, E Coli - Glasstress: 2011

Luke Jerram’s glass Escherichia coli, (commonly abbreviated E. coli), is a ‘Gram-negative rod-shaped bacterium that is commonly found in the lower intestine of warm-blooded organisms (endotherms)’.

© Luke Jerram - Glasstress: 2011

© Javier Perez Glasstress

© Javier Perez Glasstress

Glasstress: © Maria Roosen

Glasstress: © Marya Kazoun

http://www.glasstress.org

Eldridge Street Synagogue's new stained-glass window co-designed by artist Kiki Smith and architect Deborah Gans. Photo: K.Lala

Kiki Smith at the Eldridge Street Synagogue, photo: Kisa Lala

The circular window is anchored by a six-pointed star of David at its centre with celestial stars spiraling towards it – as many as 600 of them representing the federal period, establishing the identity of the United States, and marrying symbolically the Jewish faith and the immigrant population of the Lower East Side that originally founded the 1887 synagogue.

Star Of David at the Eldridge Street Synagogue photo:Klala

The window which reportedly weighs more than 6000lbs, is 16 feet in diameter and uses a new lamination technique to hold the 1200 plates of glass together instead of the traditional lead frames used in the past. Describing the construction process, Ms Kiki Smith noted that in pre-gothic times stained windows were usually narrow because they could not make big expansive openings to allow light to enter; new engineering methods had to be developed that could hold the weight of the separate pieces in place. “Traditional lead would have made [this] enormously busy and cumbersome. Where the glass meets is clear space, the light hits the glass on the side…creating a dynamic intervention of daily light with semi transparent areas that bring the outside in. Traditional stain glass doesn’t allow as much light in,” she explained. Silver stain was used to make the blue grass greener.

Kiki Smith at the Eldridge Street Synagogue, photo: Kisa Lala

Kiki Smith has worked extensively with glass and she has created stained glasses with figurative narratives, as well as star motifs in the past, but she admitted that it had been a treat for her for the first time to design for an architectural space with the limitations that implied in terms of creating functional art.

Ms. Smith said, “I am a conservative person who likes tradition so it is very meaningful to me to keep things alive, to revitalize things, give your own breath of life into things if you want them sustainable, just as this congregation kept itself alive…and this encourages the influx of younger people – and it is fun to be part of that.”

Kiki Smith at the Eldridge Street Synagogue, photo: Kisa Lala

Marilyn Minter, Trickle, 2010 C-Print

Far from the sweaty sidewalks of New York in the cooler climes of Gstaad, better known for its ski resorts, Marilyn Minter is co-curating a show with Fabienne Stephan titled SWEAT. The show at Patricia Low Contemporary includes works by Matthew Barney, Kate Gilmore, Mika Rottenberg, Cindy Sherman and Kiki Smith among others – with depictions of the skin’s secretions ranging from the erotic to the mundane.

Cindy Sherman : Untitled 1985

Sweat is the conditional response of our skins, the body’s largest organ: try as we might to mask the hint of arousal and exertion, the thin wet odorous film is a primitive and instinctual expression of our latent desires, a Pavlovian reflex to fear and sex. While Minter’s work explores the erotic surface tension of dirt and sweat, Kiki Smith’s work is one of abstract crystallized droplets, and Ryan McGinley photographs a runner in the saintly glow of exhaustion.

In an interview for Spread, Minter spoke to me of her focus on body fluids, “ I am not interested in shock value; anything forensic, like scars, doesn’t interest me.  It has to be something that could happen. Nothing surreal, just things that exist: snot, drool…licking.”

Mika Rottenberg’s video, Fried Sweat, involves a sweaty bodybuilder that subsequently vanishes, the material body transforming into ether. It plays with the ideas of expenditure of energy as in her earlier video Tropical Breeze, where the product of labour results in sweat-soaked tissues that Ms Rottenberg once tried to sell on Ebay as an art experiment, but in this case, the result of perspiration did not lead to success.

Ryan McGingley, Coley (Injured) 2007 C-Print

Kiki Smith, Five Elements of a Dewbow, 1999 Glass

Rottenberg, who was once Minter’s student at SVA, had also collaborated previously with Minter on an installation for Sweat in Paris in 2008. Rottenberg described the collaboration, “It was Marilyn’s work, [with a photograph of] sweaty armpits – you had to move the piece and there was a peeking hole, and I had the video (Fried Sweat) behind her photograph.”

Interview with Mika Rottenberg in issue#5 of Spread p20-21 online;
Interview at installation set for Squeeze, 2010)
Patricia Low Contemporary, Sweat August 8-October 10th, 2010, PARKSTRASSE     3780 GSTAAD     SWITZERLAND