2008 fyllde Bertil Vallien 70 år.
Det firade vi på VIDA med en stor utställning i Konsthallen. 21 mars - 18 maj
Utställningen hette " 70 - 70 - 7 "
Både Bertil och hans hustru Ulrica fyllde 70 år och VIDA museum 7 år.
Bertil Vallien är en förnyare av det svenska glaset.
En sandgjutningens mästare, erkänd för
sitt konstnärskap över hela världen.
Han är representerad på museer och gallerier i USA, Japan, Australien och Europas konsthuvudstäder.
Vi har samarbetat med Bertil Vallien sedan 1981 på Galleriet i Borgholm,
på mässor och museer i Sverige, Europa och USA.
Bertil Vallien och hans hustru Ulrica Hydman-Vallien har sedan 2001 varsin utställningshall i VIDA museum.
Här visas de viktigaste avstampen från tidigt 1960-tal fram till det absolut senaste verken.
Bertil Vallien förnyar ständig utställningen i museivingen på VIDA.
Han ställer ut ett par gånger om året på de bästa gallerierna
i USA.
Rescention från 61AMERICAN CRAFT JUNE/JULY 2006
Bertil Vallien’s glass sculptures echo an icy, hyperborean
world of black lichened forests and candescent claustrophobic
light. They are rooted in archaic northern sources. Their
themes reach back to ninth-century Scandinavian myths,
chanted skaldic sagas such as The Poetic Edda, which chronicles
the creation and the ultimate destruction of the world.
“The sun turns black, earth sinks in the sea, / The hot stars
down from heaven are whirled,” recites the bard in the Edda’s
cataclysmic first poem, “Voluspo.” These epic chords reverberate
in the psychic and material depths of Vallien’s glass. To peer
into the Swedish artist’s silvered, celestial, timeless world is to
gaze downward through the impenetrable, clouded surface of a
frozen lake, while being aware of the turning arc of a pale sky
above. Vallien’s art calls forth a peculiar, nocturnal sorrow; its
suspended, gelid interiors convey both immensity and occlusion.
This work investigates the realm of dreams and nightmares; it
incarnates what the Norwegian novelist and poet Tarjei Vesaas
once called the “unknown sea inside a dream.”
Over the last 40 years, Vallien, who works from a Kosta Bodaaffiliated
glassworks in Afors, Sweden, pioneered the development
of the technique of sand-casting for glass sculpture,
producing masterly, iconic forms that depict luminous depth—a
sharp contrast to the reflective, shiny surfaces typical of glass.
This exhibition, titled “Odyssey,” reaffirmed the artist’s most
famous statement, “Glass eats light,” which has followed him
around the world and still sums up best the deep, pellucid glow trapped in the interior of his sculptures. Gone-05,
2005, for example, radiates a transcendent cobalt blue, and takes the form of an upended longboat on a plinth,
signifying Vallien’s continuing preoccupation with the imagery of physical and metaphorical journeys and with the
legacy of his Scandinavian background.
Not surprisingly, then, to look at a work by Vallien means to engage in a search, to navigate through a sand- and
oxide-encrusted glass surface punctuated by bright peepholes opening into a strange, inward landscape. Putting
one’s eye up close to the work forces prolonged examination and, in the process, raises a pernicious doubt: can
looking hard lead to sight, insight or even understanding? Vallien’s art retains inscrutability; it is striking for its
sense of silence.
Vallien has often made work in series (using houses, crosses, bridges, hanging staves, runic monoliths, heads
and torsos as imagery), and his best known motif has been the boat, with its existential associations with voyages,
danger and death. But this exhibition reaffirmed Vallien’s eminence as a figurative sculptor of human form. Both
primitive and exalted, these archaic heads and static, frontal torsos keenly reflect a duality at the core of the
artist’s sculpture—a tension between his quest for fundamental, archetypal forms and the inevitable sweep of
time and decay in the natural world of the body.
In Janus (Map), 2005, for example, a homuncular face striated with map lines hangs from the back of an
elegantly scumbled, argentine head—perhaps to suggest that the “map” of one’s being can often be found in one’s
face. Other Janus heads also emphasize the double sidedness and ambiguity at the core of human identity: they
include faces flickering inside faces, a “reality” entombed behind a glassy outer facade. A chill pervades these
forms: their light-filled, tightly closed interior selves perversely hint at the magnitude of a void. Like his bardic
predecessors, Bertil Vallien has traced a song of lamentation beneath the surface of his art. Here, death and
beauty reside hand in hand. —POLLY ULLRICH
Polly Ullrich is an art critic based in Chicago.
