Josepha Gasch-Muche

Josepha Gasch-Muche at Glasstress Fondazione Berengo and Berengo Studio

German artist  has featured sculptures in a number of Glasstress exhibitions over the years. She first discovered her now distinctive style in 1988 when she – in her own words – “stumbled across” display glass as an artistic medium. She went on to use special pliers to break the glass into lots of small, irregularly shaped shards that she then layered on a canvas, securing them with glue. “I had arranged the shards in such a way that they all faced in a set direction and formed a homogenous structure,” she recalls, “Their appearance nevertheless changed with the incidence angle and the intensity of the light that struck them, and of course with the vantage point of the viewer. I was fascinated by the difference in sameness. That something identical is at the same time different!”

The artwork featured in this year’s Glasstress is a round wall hanging that has been subsequently coloured and darkened by the artist with pigment and graphite dust. “I wanted to exclude the light from the originally sparkling, brilliant, light-emitting work,” Gasch-Muche notes. Under the title “The absence of light” the artwork presents the artist’s direct reaction to the current state of the world, in her own words “the great silence on the blatant, inhumane world events.” 
 
Josepha Gasch-Muche (b.1944 Saarland, Germany.) lives and works in Hannover, Germany. She studied painting and drawing at the Academy of Fine Arts in Trier, Germany.  Early on she absorbed the teaching of her professor and Bauhaus member, Boris Kleint.  The Bauhaus explorations of the essential “materiality” of substances have had a clear influence on Gasch-Muche’s work. Her work is represented in the collections of the 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.