Glass That Bends, Canvases That Glow—April’s Artworks Turn Familiar Materials Strange
Glass isn’t always fragile. At the Whitney Biennial, Charisse Pearlina Weston’s smoked glass sculpture hovers overhead, transforming a delicate material into something unexpectedly tense—hinting at both vulnerability and resistance, and nodding to the history of Black protest. Meanwhile, Guglielmo Castelli’s canvases in Venice twist children’s book imagery into shadowy, surreal forms, where everyday objects become uncanny motifs. In New York, Rachel MacFarlane’s burnt-orange landscapes channel climate anxiety into dreamlike scenes, where sunlit decay feels both beautiful and unsettling. Kevin McNamee-Tweed’s ceramic paintings blur the line between vessel and canvas, echoing ancient storytelling while capturing the clutter of modern creativity. Across the Atlantic, Dorothy Bohm’s Paris street photos and Filippo de Pisis’s quietly emotional still lifes prove that even the simplest scenes can pulse with hidden thrill. This month’s art obsessions reveal how familiar materials—glass, clay, paint, and even memory—can be bent, stretched, or shadowed into something entirely new.
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