Josepha Gasch-Muche

For her fascinating works of art, Josepha Gasch-Muche uses a very special, extremely thin glass (150 micrometers thin), which is actually intended for the displays of cell phones and similar technical devices. She creates murals and three-dimensional objects from thousands of wafer-thin pieces of glass, which she layers onto canvases or solid surfaces and fixes almost invisibly.

When light hits these layers of glass, the surfaces come impressively to life. Everything changes with the viewer’s perspective, with the incidence of light, which is captured and reflected in the relief in a variety of ways, constantly transforming itself anew and setting it vibrantly in motion. In their dazzling ambiguity, Josepha Gasch-Muche’s works allow visitors to experience the full sensuality of light.

Her work is represented in many collections including Museum Kunst Palast, Dusseldorf, Germany; Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, NY; Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Germany; Musée Mudac, Lausanne, Switzerland; the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk VA; Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo OH; and the Shanghai Museum of Glass, Shanghai, China.

Energetic force fields

Josepha Gasch-Muche paints with glass. This is not just a metaphor. The arrangement of her sculptural formations on square picture supports, on the radiant white of a wooden background, for example, or the hanging of the works on the wall represent very concrete strategies, as we know them from painting. Her works, which are of course always also sculptural structures, are in a way hybrids. They move between sculpture and painting and can perhaps best be categorized using the term “specific objects” coined by Donald Judd for such works.

The sculptural element of the artist’s objects manifests itself in the material she uses and its artistic treatment. Gasch-Muche works with wafer-thin glass splinters in the form of irregular and differently sized triangles, quadrilaterals and polygons. She fixes them on their bases, layers them on top of and next to each other and fixes them in different directions of movement. Color, as we know, is the result of light and pigment. Without light, there is no color. Light plays an essential role in the artist’s works, pigment does not. It would therefore be more accurate to speak here of non-colored painting. The works’ glass, which is organized in different directions, refracts the light in them in different ways. As a result, different shapes, lines and lineaments crystallize within the circular formations in which Gasch-Muche has arranged her glass elements. We see concentric circles, ellipticals and arcs.

When the light refracts on the fractal glass surfaces, moving and changing shapes are formed within the ideal geometric figure of the circle. Their physiognomy depends on the amount, intensity and angle of the incident light as well as the position and perspective of the viewer. Depending on the degree and number of these parameters, the appearance of the surfaces and thus the images we see changes. This fluidity turns the artist’s objects into living and moving puzzle pictures of a dynamic unfolding of forces. Gasch-Muche reinforces the painterly impression of her sculptural works by adding white granules. Together with the iridescent glass, they create enchanting scores of gold, silver and white tones, whose colouring is solely due to the organization of the uncoloured material and the respective incidence of light.

Josepha Gasch-Muche does not reserve titles for her works, but arranges them according to the date of their completion. One reads that she gives dates a magical, mystical quality in her imagination. This would correspond to the fact that the constructive vocabulary of her works is also oriented towards Platonic ideal forms such as the circle, triangle and square. Like fixed stars, they defined the horizon of the Greek thinker, and like fixed stars, they form the frame of reference for the artist’s works. For Plato, such modules were archetypal forms that provided a reliable measure de more geometrico for the determination of beauty. Gasch-Muche quotes this concept of beauty and at the same time contrasts it with another aesthetic ideal. When she dynamizes and vitalizes her glass circles with the help of light, she creates energetic fields. The original form becomes a form of life, the immutable becomes mobile and the philosophical image becomes an ontological image of our time.

Michael Stöber, Hanover, Salon Salder 2004 – News from Lower Saxony Studios