IT IS no exaggeration to say as Canberra Glassworks has done, that veteran glass artist Klaus Moje is “a national living treasure.”
Moje is a celebrated artist in his native country, Germany, and a leader in his adopted home, Australia, where he headed up the Canberra School of Art glass workshop for many years and a passionate spokesperson for the ACT arts community at large.
Moje will eventually leave behind him a legacy in the form of Australia’s top glass artists. But at 75, with 60 years of artistic practice behind him, he is still a significant exhibiting artist whose work is represented in dozens of public collections in Europe, Australia, Japan and the United States.
It is not surprising, then, to discover that the exhibition of his works “Klaus Moje: A Continuum”, running until this Wednesday, October 20, is not a retrospective at all but an unveiling of daring new glass artworks.
If you’re unfamiliar with Moje’s work, you should not expect the showiness of blown glass, but rather the depth and complexity of the form; he pretty well reinvented, kiln-formed glass.
In this exhibition, we see mostly wall pieces but also platters and – dramatically-placed in the Glassworks’ smokestack – an installation of nine roll-ups, tall vertical vessels made from sheet glass then fired in a kiln.
For the larger part, it is the wall pieces that dominate the show. If you consider the control necessary to place the many canes and pieces of glass into geometrically-arranged patterns and sometimes freer-flowing compositions before the firing takes place, it is by any estimate an extraordinary technical feat.
It has been said by the Chief Curator of the Portland Art Museum in Portland Oregon, Bruce Guenther, that Moje uses fused glass in the
manner of a painter, allowing the “options to be glossy and matte, textured and full.” The result is a fascinating kaleidoscope of colours and shapes, perfectly controlled by a master.
Aptly titled “a continuum,” it cannot be doubted that this exhibition represents just another stage of Moje’s work.
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