Josepha Gasch-Muche

Heller Gallery is pleased to present Dangerous Beauty, our second solo exhibition of work by German artist Josepha Gasch-Muche. The exhibition includes eleven works by the award-winning artist dating from 2006-2021.

Josepha Gasch-Muche explores essential geometric forms and patterns using densely layered glass shards and light.

Originally trained as a painter, Gasch-Muche studied with Boris Kleint, a former Bauhaus member and an assistant to the Weimar school’s core teacher and theorist, Johannes Itten. Kleint inculcated Gasch-Muche with the Bauhaus credos of essential materiality of substances and economy of means. In 1998, when she started experimenting with very thin, industrial liquid crystal display glass, the then-new material allowed her to fully realize them.

She breaks sheets of clear glass into shards and arranges them, by the thousands, into simple geometric shapes. The resulting wall pieces expand beyond the canvas or wood substrate. They absorb, reflect, and refract light, creating an ambiguity of perception. Viewed from a distance some objects seem to have a smooth surface with a mother-of-pearl sheen and can appear soft and fur-like, but up close they reveal themselves as sharp and dangerous. In each piece the form remains tangible, while light acts as the catalyst rendering the surfaces optically active and mutable.

Gasch-Muche works with clear glass mostly on black, gray, or white backgrounds, occasionally experimenting with color. A 2016 work with red ground is included in the exhibition.

Josepha Gasch-Muche studied painting and drawing at Saarland University of Fine Arts in Saarbrucken, and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Trier (both Germany). Her work was the subject of a 2014 solo exhibition Luminous Phenomena Made of Glass at the Roemer und Pelizaeus Museum, Hildesheim, Germany. Gasch-Muche is the recipient of numerous art awards, among them the 2006 Coburg Glass Prize for Contemporary Art in Europe, the 2006 Bombay Sapphire Prize, The Bombay Sapphire Foundation, London and the 2007 Silver Prize at The International Exhibition of Glass, Kanazawa, Japan. Her work is represented in public collections internationally, including the Museum Kunst Palast, Dusseldorf, Germany; Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Germany; Musée Mudac, Lausanne, Switzerland; Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, NY; Lowe Art Museum, Miami, FL; Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA; Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo OH; and the Shanghai Museum of Glass, Shanghai, China.