An amazing glass garden
Montreal hosts exhibit of Dale Chihuly’s stunning creations,
MONTREAL A veritable garden of glass has bloomed within the walls of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. It’s the first major Canadian museum show by U.S. artist Dale Chihuly, who has brought his glass creations to the downtown Montreal location until Oct. 20. Chihuly is renowned for revolutionizing the studio glass movement.
Diane Charbonneau, curator of Chihuly: Utterly Breathtaking, says that Chihuly has elevated glass to a fine art level, first through sculpture and then through installation Nature is his inspiration, but, Charbonneau noted, “it’s always an interpretation, never a real-life rendering.”
Visitors get their first look the works before they walk into the Michael and Renata Hornstein Pavilion. Sun, a round tower five metres in diameter, shines from the front steps and casts rays through tendrils in primary colours.
“The Sun has 1,200 elements,” Charbonneau said, adding it took four days to set up and is one of the most popular pieces.
Once inside, the exhibits form an immersive environment starting with the Turquoise Reeds, featuring dozens of spear-shaped forms reaching up from the trunks of salvaged red cedar.
Then it’s on to one of Chihuly’s most popular works, the Persian Ceiling, which consists of shapes and forms in vivid colours arranged over plates of glass.
There are several other environments — blown glass towers and chandeliers resembling stalagmites and stalactites, boats looking like horns of plenty and a forest that Chihuly created using 300 colours of glass. The forest, one of Charbonneau’s favourites, has reflective panels around it that make it look more vast than it actually is. “I felt so touched by seeing it,” she recalls about first encountering the forest in Chihuly’s studio.
The Persian Colonnade shows Chihuly’s interpretation of flowers and Mille Fiori looks like an enchanted garden. The concept is explored further in Glass Forest No. 6, featuring blown glass filled with argon gas and neon.
The Ruby Pineapple recreates a chandelier Chihuly created with French glass-blowers in 1997. The original was lost when the ship carrying it from France to Seattle was hit by a severe storm and its crate was swept overboard.
Charbonneau said Chihuly was keen to do a new version of the pineapple for Montreal because he thought it appropriate that a piece originally created in France be reborn in Canada’s mainly Frenchspeaking city.
It took six trucks to bring the approximately 10,000 pieces to make the art works to Montreal from Chihuly’s base in Seattle. A team worked 10 days to set everything up.
Chihuly has seen his creations in more than 200 museums.