Alex Gabriel Bernstein

Art Alliance for Contemporary Glass, artist of the Month, May 2009

Passages A beam of light cuts across the room and a plume of glowing amber glass unfurls from the rough, carbon black trunk in artist Alex Gabriel Bernstein’s installation at Chappell Gallery. Before our eyes, the rough solidity of metal seems to take flight in a burst of lapping flames, ruffled feathers, cleaving crystals. Metaphors of movement, metamorphosis, and passage abound in Orange Lady and across the sculptures of this accomplished glass artist.

However, while Bernstein’s work may be united by an intense exploration of themes of transformation, his talent is marked by the diversity of forms and techniques this exploration takes. Orange Lady comes from the first of his two current bodies of work and is representative in its heavily sculpted, dynamic form; its incorporation of fused steel; and its emphasis on a physical passage between contrasting surfaces. In the second contemporaneous body of sculptures Bernstein shifts technique, evoking psychological passages, which must be sought by the viewer. The titles Pink Window, Curtain Door, Orange Passage in this series themselves indicate an interest in a movement through space. Fittingly, here Bernstein combines layers of rich color in each cast block of glass with carved textures and softened, sandblasted surfaces that together require viewers to move around these sculptures in order to discover the translucent places of visual passage. Whereas movement is physically embedded in the form of Orange Lady, it is enacted by the curiosity of the viewer in Curtain Door. In both series, Bernstein develops forms he has cultivated from over a lifetime in glass art. Son of established glass artists William and Katherine Bernstein, he grew up in their studios and those of other pioneers of the Studio Glass movement. From this Bernstein encountered a vast vocabulary of techniques and forms, but more importantly, he gained a sharp sense of his need to set himself apart. At first this process of self-definition led him away from glass. He studied psychology as an undergraduate, later working in the children’s ward of a psychiatric hospital. When Bernstein returned to making glass art he brought with him his experience and interest in perception, the point where visual, psychological, and physical realities merge. Following a period of study with the Czech artist Frantisek Janák, Bernstein turned to the technique of cast glass and with it launched his mature career. He earned his MFA at Rochester Institute of Technology in 2001 and has since garnered awards and honors, seen his sculptures enter numerous collections and begun to build the next generation of glass artists as a teacher at the Cleveland Institute of Art, the Worcester Center for Crafts, where he was Head of the Glass Studio, and at the Corning Museum of Glass. In 2007 he moved his studio to North Carolina. Throughout his work, Bernstein combines the process of cast glass with a technique of carved sculpture. Then, capitalizing on an early accident he had in his father’s studio that became an experiment and now part of his signature technique, Bernstein selectively coats the surface of the cast glass block with fused steel filings. The union of these techniques plays the pure, translucent fragility of the glass medium against the visceral, physical, and mechanical nature of the carved gesture and the modern solidity of steel. The resulting sculptures seem to be simultaneously in motion and petrified, organic and industrial, constantly passing between opposing states; yet while the elements of the sculptures defy the eye, the viewer is pulled closer, tempted to touch, to knock, to explore the mysterious alchemy at the crux of each form. As Bernstein has found his voice in the seductive medium of glass, so he invites viewers to find their own space in the passages of his sculptures.

Mitra Abbaspour
Art Historian and Doctoral Candidate at City University of New York, Graduate Center

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