Brian Clarke at Tony Shafrazi - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Art in America, June, 1995 by Ken Johnson

Brian Clarke is an English stained-glass designer who has collaborated with such famous architects as Arata Isozaki, Sir Norman Foster and Will Alsop. His ambitious glass works are conceived not just as windows or ornamental punctuations but as conspicuous design elements within large-scale building projects. In Leeds, England, for example, a vast, cathedral-style glass roof holds up some 11,500 square feet of Clarke's brilliantly multihued, grid-patterned glass over a gentrified outdoor shopping mall, creating a striking visual spectacle and a kind of Apollonian benediction of the capitalist marketplace.

This exhibition at Shafrazi introduced Clarke to America. It included a selection of recent paintings--loose, medium-sized abstractions in which little squares, crosses and ovals are casually drawn in white over dark blue fields. But one got the impression that the show's primary purpose was to fish for Clarke's first American architectural commission. Featured were slick photo-and-text documentary panels, architectural models, paper designs for glassworks, and four large, backlit, colored-glass windows. Each of the windows measures almost 12 feet square, but, as it happens, each is only a representative piece of a much larger scheme meant for a whole building. Although you had to imagine what the ultimate work would be like, this presentation did convey a good sense of what Clarke is about.

Clarke's glass designs involve the interplay of allover grid patterns and free-floating organic shapes or gestural marks that oppose the Cartesian order. The most interesting things about his enterprise, however, are its vast scale and its seductively luminous material. The Glass Dune (1 994), for an unbuilt structure designed by Future Systems, is one of his most intriguing projects. Shaped like a boomerang in plan and like a sand dune in elevation, the building has one concave, bell-shaped facade of glass. The upper half of this enormous window was to be articulated by Clarke into a grid of repeated green boomerang shapes on a blue field. The grid is also interrupted by large orange crosses shaped as though they'd been impulsively painted with a giant brush, thus playing hot expressionism against cool rationalism.

No doubt the actual experience of this building in terms of color, light and space would have been breathtaking. Within the confines of the gallery, however, one couldn't help but be disappointed by Clarke's limited pictorial imagination. His interweaving of grid patterns and organic forms is always decoratively handsome, but it is too formulaic to be interesting when isolated from an architectural context.