Client: National Museum in Wrocław Poland

Location: Wrocław, Poland

Completion date: 2015

Project Team

Artist

Barbara Idzikowska

Atelier Si, Pb...

Artist

Rache Garceau

Artist

Jakub Lech

Overview

The multimedia installation: Sleeping … or the awakening of Beauty is inspired by the motif of the well-known fairy tale. The silhouette of natural size, created of translucent glass is reclining on a steel pedestal. Suspended in space above, there is an image of a woman's portrait fused onto the rectangular canvas weaved of glass stringers, of dimension: 350 x 481 cm. The sound of contemporary opera is synchronized with dynamic sequences of digital images being projected on glass objects and throughout them onto walls around.

Goals

The translucent glass objects of the installation referring to the art of antiquity and the Renaissance are at the same time innovative formal solutions. The Sleeping's dream in the form of luminous visualizations together with extreme sounds of the opera generate mysterious and perhaps even mystical atmosphere which we perceive as familiar and unknown to us at the same time.
The whole piece was created to fit the space of the main hall at the National Museum in Wrocław.

Process

Project initiated by Barbara Idzikowska during her artistic residencies at The John Michael Kohler Arts Center and at The Studio of The Corning Museum of Glass, USA in 2013; was continued and accomplished in Atelier Si, Pb...; for the first time was presented at the National Museum in Wrocław in 2015; honored in the 37th edition of the New Glass Review, published by The Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, NY, USA, 2015. The artist Rachel Garceau is a model and collaborator in the first stage of the project. Agata Zubel the famous, contemporary opera singer and composer shared her music piece. Jakub Lech illuminated the installation.