Fragile – Alles aus Glas

Glass has fascinated people ever since they began working with it. In the diversity of its properties – viscous and crystalline, fragile and resistant at one and the same time – it proves to be a material that poses immense artistic challenges. Only in the increasingly close cooperation between artists and renowned glass manufactories that we see today does the exquisite material appear to have become tractable. At the same time, glass positively invites metaphorical charging and intellectual and spiritual interpretation. Book and exhibition therefore follow closely the questions concerning the artistic emancipation of this material since the nineteenth century as well as that „cult of the crystalline“ cultivated, for instance, by the visionary architectural fantasies of the Gläserne Kette around Bruno Taut and Hans Scharoun. Equally vividly presented is the struggle of the „glass designers“ for a form freed of ornament, as championed by Peter Behrens and Adolf Loos. A great influence on the art of the twentieth century was exerted, moreover, by the „Large Glass“ (1915) by Marcel Duchamp, long regarded as enigmatic. In the destructive acts of the politicised art of the 1960s it is a constantly recurring point of reference, and the works of Barry LeVa, Tony Cragg or Bethan Huws, for example, give expression to a debate about the „glass“ legacy of Marcel Duchamp that reaches into the present. Finally, the glass works of Thomas Schütte, winner of the Ernst Franz Vogelmann Prize, open up a polyphonic contemporary spectrum together with works by Christoph Brech, Tony Cragg, Ayşe Erkmen, Louisa Clement, Luciano Fabro, Gabriella Gerosa, Asta Gröting, Mona Hatoum, Marta Klonowska, Isa Melsheimer, Cornelia Parker, Gerda Schlembach and Timm Ulrichs.

Exhibitions:
Städtische Museen Heilbronn / Kunsthalle Vogelmann, 18/12/2021 – 15/4/2022
Kunstmuseum Ahlen, 19/6 – 16/10/2022