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About Objects of Glass and Painting
Glass offers very special-even partly contradictory-qualities. It is transparent and glittering, seemingly weightless, yet crystalline, solid and sharp. For some time the artist Anatolij Grischko (born 1938) has been fascinated by this material. Using simple panes of float glass, Grischko creates objects congenial with his paintings. Inspired by his approach to nature, the artist has succeeded in constructing ball-shaped forms and globes with flat panes of float glass. For this Grischko developed the principle of layering which belongs to the most important characteristics of his work: First glass panes with increasing radii , then –starting in the center of the globe- panes with decreasing radii, are put together, with small rectangle glass blocks connecting them, thus forming an expansive ball. Transparent round surfaces, alternating with pale green edges and disk-shaped voids play a differentiated game, at first confusing to the eye. Thanks to a special transparent adhesive set up by UV radiation and remaining completely invisible, the layering does not lose any of its transparency. Sandblasted rectangular or circular panes, with steadily increasing radii towards the center of the globe, contrast the transparency by a soft-milky or slightly rough appearance. Transparent or intensely blue shards, obviously nothing else but fragments of glass bottles, appear in cubic or rectangular ducts (???) of industrial glass. Here the artist again declines the contrasting effects of the smooth to the sharp-edged, the colorless to the intensity of translucid colors or, vey subtly, the delicate differences between diverse types of colorless glass. Fragmentation and irregularity are opposed to straight contours and closed forms. The Ukrainian-born artist first took a degree of architecture and engineering; then, from 1962-1967, he studied painting at the secondary school of Fine Arts in Irkutsk, finishing his studies with a diploma. This career may explain the analytical, constructivistic side of his work, Grischko, however, always adds a second lyric, playful component. In his paintings. the last color is applied with a rocker so that the color is only partly absorbed, which results in a soft, picturesque structure. When working with glass, it is the contradictory character of the material that attracts and inspires Grischko: The coolness and the sharp edges, the hardness of the contours and, at the same time, its fragility and transparency, becoming voluminous by the technique of layering, and last not least its glittering, turning reality into illusion
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