EXHIBITION
LOBBY OF 1 CANADA SQUARE

Visitors to the newly refurbished central lobby of 1 Canada Square will enjoy a wonderfully calming and immersive experience as internationally acclaimed artist Angela Glajcar creates a series of visionary, site-specific paper installations. The formal rigour and elegant simplicity of her starkly monochromatic paper creations are perfectly positioned within this normally busy, bustling thoroughfare. They invite the visitor to embrace and absorb the textures and contours of her striking sculptures and consider the dialogue created between, scale, material and space.

Angela Glajcar lives and works in Germany. Her installations invite us to explore the compelling way in which she manipulates paper, realising a harmonious interplay of light and shadow and of movement and stillness. Her work is completely original and does not sit within any traditional category of art. She began her career working with wood and steel before turning to paper, which she appreciates for its versatility as a medium, sometimes creating monumental installations by combining hundreds of sheets of hand torn paper. These creations become three dimensional, reminding us of the endless flexibility of this essential resource, either manufactured by hand or mechanically, assuming an ambiguous position between the natural and the artificial.

By creating three-dimensional shapes out of a two-dimensional material, Angela’s ethereal sculptures fundamentally question our conception of form and space. This natural fibre is light and fragile, which she often tears to reveal its open fibres, making it both beautiful and imperfect. The installations are intricate and multi-layered with hand torn cavities, which are contained within the volume of the larger spaces. As the viewer is drawn into their cavernous depths the ripped-out hollows suggest various interpretations, are they perhaps wounds or ruptures. From an early age Angela has absorbed and embraced the topography of the natural world. Although her work is objectively non-figurative, one can see her fascination for landscape. The hollowed out sections might remind the viewer of caves or grottos and the constant erosion of our natural world.

The graceful rhythmic structures are multi-dimensional, and like the landscape, offer different views and interpretations depending on the viewers site-line. Angela creates each individual work on site, this becomes part of the creative process, a choreographed dance as she constructs her creations by layering, stacking, creating movement, separating light and shadow and partitioning space. 

In this exhibition Angela reflects on how we respond to scale, interrogating our conventional thinking. Angela shared that during lockdown she began to think more about the distinction between larger and smaller pieces and she named the idea SCALE MATTERS.

This new way of thinking led Angela to ask whether there should be a valid distinction between small and large works. Is there a specific significance between the two which fundamentally changes the interpretation of the work. Do we instinctively measure the importance of art by size. The series SCALE MATTERS is a perhaps provocative invitation to the viewer to consider these questions and to form their own conclusions. 

In today’s electronic world traditional paper products are fast disappearing as a means to communicate and distribute data. However the medium is experiencing a renaissance in the arts. Angela’s sculptures offer an individual and original aesthetic, manipulating and transforming paper, creating complex and sensual forms, which even though feather light and fragile have the evident mass, tactility and scale of great sculptures 

Angela Glajcar studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Nuremberg from 1991 to 1998 and has received numerous awards and fellowships, including, Emy- Roeder Award and Vordemberg-Gildewart Award. Glajcar has created installations in public spaces including St Peter Kircke Station in Cologne, the cultural department of the City of Frankfurt. Her work is held in many museums including Ludwigshafen, Hof and Fondazione Amici di Castelbasso among others. Her works have been exhibited in exhibitions around the world including.Stockholm, England, France, Italy and USA. 

By Jacquiline Creswell