Isa Melsheimer

The Window

The Window, Esther Schipper Seoul
Isa Melsheimer, The Window, Esther Schipper, Seoul, South Korea.
Isa Melsheimer, The Window, Esther Schipper, Seoul, South Korea.
Isa Melsheimer, The Window, Esther Schipper, Seoul, South Korea.
Isa Melsheimer, The Window, Esther Schipper, Seoul, South Korea.
Isa Melsheimer, The Window, Esther Schipper, Seoul, South Korea.

Esther Schipper, Seoul, South Korea 25 Apr–26 May 2023

The Window, Chaos and order, beauty and danger, Isa Melsheimer’s sculptures made from green glass shards seem to combine contradictory impulses. Assembled from hundreds of pieces, the sculptures demonstrate mutable characteristics of glass, thus, for example, the combination of fragility and strength, and the material’s twofold ability to protect from the elements (as window) and threaten violence (as sharp fragment). Made by hand from broken bottles, they resemble mysterious mountainous landscapes.

Paired with Lorenz Attractor, a large-scale textile work that gracefully translates complex mathematical structures into fine yarn embroideries and applied pearls, Melsheimer’s works imbue The Window space with a rich web of intellectual, formal and yet visceral associations. The butterfly, chaos theory’s most iconic image, hovers in Lorenz Attractor as guardian of this new kind of spatial poetics. In addition, a selection of gouaches by the artist will be presented throughout the other rooms of the gallery.

Installation view Photos: Jun Lee