Fragile Beauty

With the exhibition Fragile Beauty – Contemporary Artists Facing Glass, the Berlin art foundation Stiftung Starke – in collaboration with the Marco Polo Glass Gallery of Murano – was able to realise a magnificent, ambitious project – a project that carried great risks.

Glass art has by now spread across the entire world in a unique way. With very few exceptions, however, current glass art finds its basis in the limitless possibilities of standardised reproductions of works of art, which have had very little contact with the other established arts.

To put a stop to this unwelcome trend, a forceful decision was needed. A concrete and constructive collaboration between international artists and the master glassblowers of Murano had to be brought about. We consider ourselves fortunate that the project’s initiators have not only succeeded in this complicated undertaking – the collaboration will be continued over a long period and deepened further.

The exhibition you can currently see in Berlin will be only the first of a whole series of further exhibitions presenting the filigree creations of unique glass artworks that have emerged from the interplay of the inspired abilities of highly qualified artists and the extensive experience of skilled craftsmen.

With Fragile Beauty you are presented with an exhibition in which the visitor’s gaze can take many paths through the most varied objects – paths that open up thanks to the widely differing uses of this complicated and complex material, glass.

Glass is the only material capable of completely denying its own physicality before the viewer’s eyes. Glass is an incomparable substance that has enabled many artists to free themselves from the ponderousness and dullness of the hitherto over-critical assessment of certain directions in contemporary art.

Because of its manifold qualities, glass has always claimed the greatest attention of many artists – an attention whose realisation in the work sometimes looks like free experimentation and at other times seems like mystical poetry, an eloquent art beyond all known communication. The exhibition invites you to experience this fragile dialogue between work and viewer directly.

Glass is one of the few materials whose working allows direct access to a world free of all restrictions imposed by systematic concepts, to a world often entirely unknown to us, in which the chance opens up before us to truly grasp other realities from unfamiliar angles.

Transparency, clarity, reflectivity, refractive power and the chance occurrences in the molecular arrangement of the material allow artists to present their personal creativity and language in a completely new way, with a clarity that, precisely because of the transparency of the material used, cannot be ignored.