Vitrea. The 35 works exhibited represent a selection from a long series focused exclusively on the subject of glass: Scherffig has completed more than fifty drawings of found industrial glass fragments.
“With an almost hallucinogenic quality of hyperrealism she delineates what she sees on the
surface of things, and in doing so reveals something more profound and more unsettling
about their essential qualities.”
“With this series of drawings, she looks at the thickness of glass, the way that it manipulates
light the sense of how things glimpsed through glass might be manipulated and distorted by
the substance itself. Also the impact of light on its surface, where glass begins to demonstrate
the essential ambiguities of perception.”
Deyan Sudjic
Faggionato Fine Arts is delighted to present Vitrea, a new body of work by the artist Elisabeth
Scherffig.
Showing her work in London for the fourth time, Scherffig has become known for her ability
to concentrate deeply on the matter and form of her subject, to bring into the light - through
the elemental process of mark-making – its most fundamental and intrinsic qualities.
With small repeated monochrome marks, in chalk lead on slightly textured Arches paper,
Scherffig patiently describes matter inch by inch; the hardness of the material itself –
industrial rubble, rusted steel, fractured glass – transformed by the soft chalk lead marks into
a muted, dreamlike image.
The 35 works exhibited represent a selection from a long series focused exclusively on the
subject of glass: since 2009 Scherffig has completed more than fifty drawings of found
industrial glass fragments, capturing an astonishing depth and variety of abstract aesthetic
properties hidden in the fabric of this overlooked detritus. She shows glass as both defined by
the light that passes through it, refracting and reflecting in myriad complexities, and yet
distinguished by the individual imperfections and strata unique to each fragment. The
microscopic intensity of her analysis results in images that evoke the play of light on water,
fur, skin and cosmic vortices, but which evade any straightforward reading - the eye follows
the light, but the subject is elusive and mysterious. Even the prosaic rhythms of wire mesh in
reinforced glass become ethereal and profound in the sepia depths.
Elisabeth Scherffig was born in Düsseldorf in 1949, and has lived and worked in Milan since
1970. She has exhibited extensively in Europe, and her work is in private collections in the
USA, UK and Europe.
Reception for the artist: 6 March 6-8pm
Faggionato Fine Arts
49 Albemarle Street London
Opening hours: Monday to Friday, 10am - 5.30pm.
Admission free