In the most fitting of locations, the sculpture exhibit at the Alexandria Natural Symposium for Sculpture in Natural Material has chosen to take advantage of what both the natural world and the so-called “material world” have to offer: the stretching shores of the Mediterranean, and the architectural elegance of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina.
Between these two wonders is the exhibition. On the library’s plaza, 16 artists from Italy, Greece, Egypt, the Czech Republic and Cyprus are showcasing works created during a preceding 15-day workshop. The end of the show will mark the addition of these pieces to the library’s permanent collection.
The show itself is unusual. Since the primary motif of this group exhibition is a material — glass — there are no particular prescriptions as to how this material should be used, besides displaying “3-D innovations of glass, light and color,” which leaves the field quite open.
While the same attributes of glass — transparency and translucency — have been exaggerated or emphasized, the differences pronounced in regards to the attitude towards the medium of sculpture itself, and its styles, vary greatly between the nationalities of the artists.
The 11 participating Egyptian artists share plenty of similarities. For the majority, the artists seemed to find real difficulty in leaving the materials be. Many of the Egyptian works are compositionally busy and overworked.
Take for instance Said Badr’s two pieces: White marble monoliths resembling the Rosetta Stone covered in words, and a black marble piece also covered with words with a red pyramid stuck in halfway between them. Both pieces look heavy and slightly deviating away from the theme of the exhibition.
Gaby Hegazy also constructed something overly complicated. Roughly-hewn natural rock shapes, strips of glass and rock, spheres of metal, angles, lines and natural forms struggle for the viewer’s attention. The resulting figure is cacophonous.
The best of the Egyptian presentations is Abdel Salam Eid’s “Installation in Glass.” Eid constructed a three-dimensional glass rectangular prism out of glass tubes and strips, the bottom of which is lit with a soft, diffuse light.
All pieces are far more impressive at night thanks to the employment of different lighting techniques, but Eid’s piece is one of the few that looks equally fascinating in daylight due to the number of contradictions inherent within it.
This flimsy glass structure of strips and straws is assembled to look like a large, dominating high rise building. Large pats of glue connecting strip to straw appear darker, messier and altogether crafted. The shape resembles forms of American minimalist artist, Donald Judd, with the base strips of red and an oily marbled color alternating around the structure.
The construction and repetition of form upon form — reiteration of a simplified idea — are reminiscent of Sol LeWitt’s geometrical sculptures of the 60s and 70s. Yet the natural assembly and apparent hand of the artist makes the work feel very human, like a refined, delicate cabin of popsicle sticks, lit up to become something ethereal: fragile and rigid all at once.
Yasmina Heidar’s “Tornado” is also stunning: a huge rounded, layered sculpture of green sea glass with a shiny, crinkled material deflecting light in the center. The sculpture is made of layers no more than a centimeter thick, painstakingly stacked, one on top of another, and then buffed to create smooth, translucent, wavering edges. The simplicity of the idea is what deems the work so successful, and it would have perhaps been even better if it hadn’t been so aggressively shaped, and if a subtler base had been used in place of the squarish granite block.
Another particularly interesting piece in terms of both sculptor and sculpture is Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s, the former UN Secretary-General. His piece, “Consumption,” is a mixture of recycled glass objects set within a dark metal three-way display board.
At night, the “Consumption” is transformed into something full of warped, abstracted shapes and vividly colored glasswork. Though most of the shapes are unrecognizable, wine bottles and Arabic and English Coca-Cola bottles are especially clear, nodding to various contemporary topics such as Americanism, moral laxity, and political and cultural relations between Egypt and the US. Another branded object is a glass cologne bottle of Cartier Pour Homme, with the clear slogan of Must de Cartier Pour Homme visibly displayed.
The pieces made by Czech and Cypriot artists stand out for being compositionally spare, constructed from no more than one material, and focusing on only one quality worth drawing attention to.
The one piece that seemed to perfectly bridge the aesthetic differences between the works of the Egyptian artists and their European counterparts is Melvina Middleton of Cyprus’ “Flying Pyramid.”
Not only does Cyprus geographically and culturally straddle these environs, Middleton’s participation in the workshop seems to have done her a great benefit as both European and Egyptian could easily comprehend her work. Sheets and sheets of clear glass have been layered into one horizontally curving piece that it looks like a full sail. In the middle, cut out of the glass is a pyramid tilted at a jaunty angle. And this is exactly what Middleton does: she takes a well-established theme, and puts it on its head, or at least, side.
The exhibition is open to the public from 9 am to 8 pm in the Plaza of the Bibliotheca until Aug. 21.
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asmina Heidar’s “Tornado”.
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