Text by Marina Warner, Gottfried Boehm, Katharina Schmidt, Jacqueline Burckhardt, Bice Curiger, Ulrich Gerster, Regine Helbling, Käthi La Roche, Urs Rickenbach, Claude Lambert.
Sigmar Polke (born 1941) recently completed a series of 12 windows for the Grossmünster cathedral in Zürich, setting new standards for the mutual relationship between art and church. One group of seven Romanesque windows shows luminous mosaics of thinly sliced agate, some of it artificially colored, to produce pulsating blocks of back-lit color. Says Marina Warner, "The interior of rocks opens not only on unexpected colors... on once imprisoned now scintillating rays and gleams, but it also tunnels into the past, into the distant past of geological and cosmological millennia." For the remaining five windows, Polke designed images of figures from the Old Testament, based on medieval illuminations, which have themselves undergone transformation in the course of their long journey through time. Polke's figures now appear as radiantly contemporary icons created in colored glass, using a variety of traditional and customized techniques devised especially for this project.
"Polke is known as the alchemist of art. In retrospect, the key to his entire oeuvre may well lie in the fact that he originally trained as a glass painter. The term 'glass painting' is, by the way, misleading, for it is an activity that involves the entire production of artistically worked glass or, more precisely, painting with colored light. The Grossmünster underscores the inadequacy of this term, for many of its images do not conform to the conventional making of stained glass, where the stain is applied on the glass; instead the images emerge in and out of the glass using a range of ancient and newly invented techniques."
Image and excerpt, from Jacqueline Burckhardt and Bice Curiger's essay "Illuminations," are reproduced from Sigmar Polke: Windows for the Zürich Grossmünster.
STATUS: Out of stock
Temporarily out of stock pending additional inventory.
FROM THE BOOK
"This extremely compelling project shows a confidence and a cogency that is neither pretentious nor flamboyant; it begins with the relatively moderate size of the twelve Romanesque windows, whose overall area measures less than two hundred square feet. They compete neither among themselves nor with Augusto Giacometti's striking chancel windows of 1933. The artist was especially taken with the plain Protestant churches of Zürich because they are not so much places of ritual as they are places of sermon, where religious and contemporary aspects interrelate. A church is not a museum. Perhaps this is why the new windows give the impression of being parables for visually saturated "in-between spaces" that allow for omissions and exclusions. Polke's pictures are pictures of this world that have found their way into a place that outlasts the ages, and through their engagement with that place, they have gained in aesthetic and spiritual value."
FORMAT: Hbk, 8 x 11 in. / 208 pgs / 90 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $65.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $87 ISBN: 9783907582275 PUBLISHER: Parkett/Zurich Grossmunster AVAILABLE: 11/30/2010 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: Out of stock TERRITORY: NA LA ASIA AU/NZ AFR ME
Published by Parkett/Zurich Grossmunster. Text by Marina Warner, Gottfried Boehm, Katharina Schmidt, Jacqueline Burckhardt, Bice Curiger, Ulrich Gerster, Regine Helbling, Käthi La Roche, Urs Rickenbach, Claude Lambert.
Sigmar Polke (born 1941) recently completed a series of 12 windows for the Grossmünster cathedral in Zürich, setting new standards for the mutual relationship between art and church. One group of seven Romanesque windows shows luminous mosaics of thinly sliced agate, some of it artificially colored, to produce pulsating blocks of back-lit color. Says Marina Warner, "The interior of rocks opens not only on unexpected colors... on once imprisoned now scintillating rays and gleams, but it also tunnels into the past, into the distant past of geological and cosmological millennia." For the remaining five windows, Polke designed images of figures from the Old Testament, based on medieval illuminations, which have themselves undergone transformation in the course of their long journey through time. Polke's figures now appear as radiantly contemporary icons created in colored glass, using a variety of traditional and customized techniques devised especially for this project.
