Tove Storch: Glassy Eyes
Glas: The Museum of Glass Art in Ebeltoft, Denmark presents Glassy Eyes, a solo exhibition by Tove Storch that showcases the visual artist’s first works in glass. The exhibition is on view through March 9th, 2025.
Materials have been an important aspect of Danish visual artist Tove Storch’s work for many years. Her installations and sculptures have often paired unexpected materials together – fabrics, resin, metal, showing the fragility, vulnerability and transformation that materials can go through. In glass, she takes control of the transformation itself, discovering this process and medium and using it to develop these themes in a new body of work. Storch was invited to work with the museum’s glassblower, Chris Lowry. Together, over the course of six-months, they tested ideas and explored new possibilities, resulting in many successes but of course also many failures and frustrations. Storch says: “Glass is a material that I haven’t been able to figure out myself. The logic I already know cannot be transferred to glass. But I’ve been given the key to look at a whole lot of things that I couldn’t see before, and now I know a lot more about how glass behaves, and it’s a kind of new highway in my practice.”
A central theme for Storch’s new glass works is the body as a container and creator for the movements of the mind. In one room, large red glass drops and spheres are installed across the floor, their murky transparency and bright colors stand out in the otherwise empty space. In another room bended glass thread-like tubes are suspended between a wooden-shelf like structure. In this case, Storch has pushed glass to its limits, creating metre-long glass threads, pushing the medium almost to the point of its collapse; that precarious moment is captured in their innocent forms. Storch’s work extends from a minimalist aesthetic but there is a humanity within it, a vulnerability and honesty that makes it connect.
The exhibition is the first visible result of a new collaboration between Glas and Art Hub Copenhagen, which under the title of Liquid Exchange gives several contemporary artists,
who have not previously worked with glass, the opportunity to create glass works and thus expand and develop their practice in a completely new direction. Storch’s residency went right up to the opening of the exhibition, with the last pieces taken out just in time for installation.
Glassy Eyes was curated by author, art critic and art editor Maria Kjær Themsen. The exhibition opened at Glas: The Museum of Glass Art on November 22, 2024 is on through March 9th, 2025.