The glass sculptures of Winnie Teschmacher (Rotterdam, 1958) are characterized
by a captivating restraint and perfection. Her works represent a never-ending
quest for the simplicity of archetypal shapes - a sphere, a circle, a lens and
a cone. Her aim is to capture an expression of beauty and a purity of form
that go beyond aesthetics alone.
When she first started out as a glass artist in the mid-1980s, Teschmacher
made predominantly beautiful bowls and vases. But she soon found that that was
not the kind of beauty she wanted to express. Teschmacher is more interested
in beauty that emanates from within, from deep down out of an inner void.
She began experimenting with the technical possibilities offered by the medium
glass, by blowing, bending and cutting it. During those experiments she
gradually came to realize that what she was working with was not actually
glass, but light and space – the true objects of her fascination.
For some time she made sculptures of cut glass - architectural, spatial forms.
Her works of blown and polished optical glass reflect her fascination with
light and a nucleus or focal point. She made a very large series of beautiful
egg-shaped sculptures of numerous different colours, often with a smaller egg
at the centre. After that she moved on to spheres with a nucleus or a coloured
central segment, stupa-like sculptures with a golden or transparent nucleus,
enormous bowls with a crystal-clear, bulging centre, round forms with a hole
in the middle, bowls resembling coloured lenses, small serene ‘nuclei’ of
black glass and, finally, her ‘depth telescopes’, which appear to draw the
viewer along to a different world via enormous lenses. The works are all
perfectly finished and, looking at them, you see them not as the products of a
creative process, but as objects that have always existed, just like light and
space, which were likewise never created, but have always surrounded us –
simple and elementary.
In these sculptures, which Teschmacher has been making since the mid-1990s,
she concentrates ever more on the nucleus, the innermost essence of the work.
Her small elliptical and egg-shaped works of black glass are actually the
nuclei of her previous works stripped of their encasings. With her sculptures
comprising a cone-shaped pendulum above a glass sphere she takes the viewer
along to the centre of the earthly powers, to the deepest secret of life.
Winnie Teschmacher’s works express her constant desire to capture that secret.
She plays with light and space and offers viewers her simple, pure, enchanting
sculptures that penetrate right through to the very core of the human soul.
Winnie Teschmacher was trained at the Visual Arts Academy in Rotterdam. In
1992 she won the Bernadine de Neeve Award. Works by Winnie Teschmacher are
included in the collections of Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the
National Glass Museum in Leerdam, Museum van der Togt in Amstelveen and
various company collections.
Source: Text by Vincent Botella
