by Danny Lane
A series of works in glass realized for Dilmos by Danny Lane, under the sign of "compression".
In 1988 Dilmos presented the seminal works of Danny Lane in the exhibition "In Vitro Crjstallisation" and now,twenty years on, Dilmos is showing a collection of historical and new pieces of the american artist.
"The structural virtue of glass is it's ability to sustain compression. Glass is 20 times as strong as concrete, under compression. It is a metaphor of the dynamic of resistance and containment. The unrefined flow of the creative impulse is strengthened and qualified by 'that which resists us' . The artist's right and fight to play!"
Famed for his large-scale Sculpture in float glass which, like the seminal "Against The Wall"(2001), shown here for the first time in Europe, defy gravity with breathtaking elegance.
Danny Lane has moved into colour.
Process has always been integral to Danny Lane’s vision, so typically, for an artist who’s driven by vision rather than the possible, he is making his own, extraordinarily vibrant, coloured glass. The process is intense, alchemical, and an integral part of the work. Like the British visionary tradition Danny Lane sees himself as a part of, from William Blake to Cecil Collins, and unlike many contemporary artists, this is a practice forged in making, in physical process, and firmly based
in the studio.
When Danny Lane’s first furnace was destroyed when his studio burnt down in 2001, he emerged Phoenix-like from the ashes of his past, and here reveals the triumphant products of his new furnaces.
The exhibition shows his huge coloured discs, up to four feet in diameter, jewellike in their depth of colour, logic-defying in their scale.
This riot of colour, recalling the spiritual roots of glass art in the stained-glass tradition, is balanced in the Dilmos exhibition with more classical pieces which demonstrate the other side of Danny Lane’s technical brilliance. New work takes on spiritual geometry, exploring the iconography of Christianity, Judaisism and Islam in a series of elegant, pared-down pieces. A unique fusion of scientific experiment and artistic vision, Danny Lane’s achievement is an inspiration.
(text by Dr Charlotte Grant, King's College Cambridge)
"Against The Wall"
August 2001
Glass and Steel
cm 732x180x229h
weight kg 5000
Photo : Peter Wood
"Charybdis" (detail)
2007
Maelstrom Edition 2:23
Diam 96 x H21cm
Colour Glass-Tangerine/Alizarin gradient
Photo: Jonathan Root
"Emerald Table"
D1580 x H740mm
Glass and steel
Dilmos, Milano
Photographer :Peter Wood
"Corkscrew Console"
L274 x W52cm x H910 19mm
Low iron glass, stainless steel
Dilmos, Milano
"Angaraib"
H1085 x L3900 x W2150 max dimensions
Glass, Hawthorne, Rope
London
Photographer: Peter Wood
