黑料不打烊

A.I.R. Gallery is pleased to announce Depending on Glass, an exhibition of installation, sculpture, and painting by A.I.R. Alum Artist Stephanie Bernheim. Connecting the bodies of work on view is the material of glass, which the artist repurposes in a new installation and uses as a sculptural support and canvas for painting.      

Throughout her career, Bernheim has explored experimental processes and used materials in unexpected ways. One evening, while Bernheim was working at her farm in the countryside, there was a dramatic storm. Suddenly, the force of the wind carried a large glass sheet several hundred feet up a hill toward her house. The glass shattered and sprinkled like snow throughout the grass, producing an unexpected landscape. Bernheim retrieved the glass remains, gathering the shards for a future work. The installation on view brings these shards together with digital transfers of Polaroids taken by Bernheim of the initial shattering, as well as early drawings of mixed-media assemblages. In these drawings, bits of glass pile up to create colorful geometric delineations, conveying a multi-dimensional experience of glass.

The artist鈥檚 Early Relief works use glass panels as a support structure for considering the possibilities of acrylic paint as a sculptural material. Bernheim creates skins by building up layers of acrylic paint on panels of glass. Over time, through methodic and experimental interventions, the acrylic bubbles, bends, curves, and contorts to create unexpected grounds. In these three-dimensional geological landscapes, paint becomes its own support and breaks free from the canvas. Bernheim has described her intention to form surfaces 鈥渨here the earth鈥檚 crust and the crust of the painterly object might coincide.鈥� 

Concluding the exhibition are several works which extend the process of Bernheim鈥檚 Early Reliefs by transforming windowpanes into canvases for painting. In these glass works, repetitive drips of paint accrete in fine, multi-hued layers through which occasional contrasting color seeps through. Moreover, the thin layered build-up exposes the transparency and reflection of the glass grounds embedded within. Hung alongside these paintings are several Paint Skins, oval, square and circular in shape, which also reference the hues, dots, and drips of the previous windowpane paintings.  

Depending on Glass surveys Bernheim鈥檚 use of a single medium across five decades. In various two- and three-dimensional forms, the artist demonstrates the possibilities of glass as an artistic material, while also suggesting more experiments are yet to come.