Sharp Order

Glass and steel are the materials one sees everywhere in the contemporary public environment. You touch the glass of your mobile device probably more often than your own skin. The life of a modern citizen is transparent. Transparency promises security.

The language of these materials is the language of industry. The sculpture “Sharp Order” looks either like a monument to a dream of an industrialized future, imagined by a 20th century man, or like a gravestone on a tomb of the humanity in the industrialized reality. We are products of culture. We are not nature, no matter how strong I would like to see myself as a part of it. Probably most of us confront nature only at the very end, dissolving into pieces during the decomposition process.

At the same time glass is magic. It is like a frozen liquid, non-existing matter, a diamond, a miracle. The image shimmers and you feel the fragility of it. The glass elements are balancing. It is all on the edge.

One can say, the sculpture “Sharp Order” is a show-case which turns into an exhibit itself.

It is a sculpture made of glass and steel. Half-cylindrical and half-truncated cone shapes and tubes are put together into a rhythmic structure. The glass elements are placed on a steel support one meter high. The tubes are embedded in long slots in the steel sheet. The sculpture can be entirely disassembled into 29 freestanding units of glass and steel.

All glass parts were manufactured by Rudi Gritsch in Rudi Gritsch Werkstätte für künstlerische Gestaltung in Schmelzglas, Kramsach, Austria.