Artist Statement
Bernard Kirschenbaum was an architect and sculptor who created structures that engaged with, and transformed, their surroundings. His work brings observers into this collaboration between an artwork and the space around it. "My work closely relates people to the sculpture. It invites people to place themselves in warping spaces; to change their height and therefore their perspective; to put themselves in an enclosing color environment; or be surrounded by patterns.” Kirschenbaum was an accomplished geometrician, designing and building the world’s first geodesic dome residence and creating sculptures that celebrate two- and three-dimensional geometric shapes and arrangements. He discovered an elegant tessellation that had never been seen in human history and used it in his sculptures. Kirschenbaum also explored the beauty evident in random patterns and surfaces. An early adopter of computer technology, he wrote his own programming to automatically randomize the size, sidedness, orientation, and placement of geometric shapes. In a nod to the beauty of random patterns in nature, he often created uniformly irregular surfaces on his sculptures, such as the powdery red-brown patinas of rusted steel, the scatter of pigment chips in urethane, and spots of white against a blue enamel background.
Information
Artist Statement
Bernard Kirschenbaum was an architect and sculptor who created structures that engaged with, and transformed, their surroundings. His work brings observers into this collaboration between an artwork and the space around it. "My work closely relates people to the sculpture. It invites people to place themselves in warping spaces; to change their height and therefore their perspective; to put themselves in an enclosing color environment; or be surrounded by patterns.” Kirschenbaum was an accomplished geometrician, designing and building the world’s first geodesic dome residence and creating sculptures that celebrate two- and three-dimensional geometric shapes and arrangements. He discovered an elegant tessellation that had never been seen in human history and used it in his sculptures. Kirschenbaum also explored the beauty evident in random patterns and surfaces. An early adopter of computer technology, he wrote his own programming to automatically randomize the size, sidedness, orientation, and placement of geometric shapes. In a nod to the beauty of random patterns in nature, he often created uniformly irregular surfaces on his sculptures, such as the powdery red-brown patinas of rusted steel, the scatter of pigment chips in urethane, and spots of white against a blue enamel background.
