Exhibition: Intriguing and beguiling new glass creations

In his first major exhibition in almost a decade, New Zealand glass artist David Murray has produced a series of works which derive from the amphora and urn shapes of the classical period as well as the neo classical reinventions of the Renaissance, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

His previous major bodies of work, Hunters and Gatherers drew on primitive sources such as simple adzes and flints while other works were abstracted shapes stemming from simple undecorated bowl forms.

These new works however tap into the sophisticated forms which came with the developing cultures of the antique world.

These became symbols of high culture and were repeated and improved over the centuries and in the nineteenth century became part of the industrialised production of classical decorative goods such as the products of Wedgewood.

Murray’s spectacular glass vessels bring together the traditions of glass making from over a two thousand year period, creating works which mirror those old forms, referencing the colours and the clear glass works of the ancient world.

While these works are copies of older forms their translucent appearance gives them sense of being ghost-like versions with the works seeming to exist in different time environments. We are aware that they are individually produced by a contemporary artist but works such as No 1 Clear ($7850) looks like an antique Roman vase newly discovered at Pompeii or a nineteenth century copy.

With works like No 2 Purple ($7600) the works seem to owe less to the antique or nineteenth century but rather contemporary abstract forms.

The glass the artist has used is richly coloured and there is an incandescent glow which gives the works both a fragility and strength with some parts of the urns densely coloured while other, thinner parts are almost ethereal.

He manages to create finely crafted shapes with beguiling surfaces and historical connections which are intriguing and beguiling and shows him moving the art of glass forward with these brave new works.

Murray himself sees his works as more political making reference to Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century which examines the growing inequality between wealth and income and proposed the introduction of a progressive global wealth tax to address the problem and sees his work as re-interpreting the overt displays of status and wealth represented by the classic European urns and vases of the 18th and 19th centuries.