Imaginary Crystallisations (Object 1-7), 2020
‘Coloured glass destroys all hatred at last’ - so believed early 20th century visionary writer Paul Scheerbart and his friend and admirer, utopian architect Bruno Taut. The same aphorism is embodied in the Imaginary Crystallisations glass sculptures of Danish artist Stine Bidstrup that glow with rich colour when backlit. These intimate solid castings are the newest iterations of her acclaimed Architectural Glass Fantasies series.
Drawing on the cultural history of glass, the utopian expressionists Scheerbart and Taut linked the idea of glass to a simulacrum of naturally occurring crystals and semi-precious stones. They sought to reinterpret in an eclectic fashion, the glass-crystal symbolism as a metaphor for transformation of a post-war society in both aesthetic, spacial and social terms, and embraced a mode of expression that was streaked with Romantic sensibility, curiosity in the irrational, and heightened sensory awareness.
Often combining impressions of classic cut glass crystal patterns with the dynamic crystalline forms of nature, Bidstrup makes an insightful statement about humanity and its dialogue with the natural world. These new sculptures reveal an interest in a literary-architectural convention associated with glass and crystal, an iconographic theme and metaphor for metamorphosis and transcendence that stretches historically from King Solomon, Jewish and Arabic legends, medieval stories of the Holy Grail, through the mystical Rosicrucian and Symbolist tradition down to Expressionism, where ancient images lurk beneath the surface impression of totally revolutionary forms.
The basic orthogonal system that underlies most of Western Architecture is mainly ignored to such a degree that the intentionally disorienting, colorful and translucent glass forms emerge as a transfigured extension of nature, an artificial crystal that amalgamates with mountainous crystal formations. The sculptural forms are not intended or perceived as fixed and measurable, nor as an ideal conjunction of forms. On the contrary, if there is an ideal, it is in the shifting kaleidoscopic forms that are continuously moving out of chaos toward a potential perfection, which is, however, never fully attained and always in the process of becoming.