Colours of Architecture

Coloured Glass In Contemporary Buildings

By Andrew Moor

Book review

Kate Maestri’s work is in the tradition of Josef Albers and those who have followed on afterward in the exploration of interactive colours – eschewing texture, narrative content and expressive illusions. Because of this purity of intent and focus, Maestri’s work has a natural appeal to the architectural purist. Her work does not introduce competing rhymes, dynamics, or forms into a space, but, as can be seen in these images, the simplicity of the design helps to elucidate and emphasise the shapes and forms already created by the building. In this sense Maestri is a classic “architect’s artist”.

Maestri was the almost inevitable winner of a shortlisted competition to find an artist to work with Foster + Partners in designing the 200-m (660-ft) long glass balustrade at Tyneside’s spectacular new live music centre, The Sage Gateshead. Her designs, like most works of a minimalist nature require a certain confidence on the part of the practitioner, as so little seems to be happening. The ideas seem so simple, yet the result can be surprisingly potent. For the glass fabricators the technical demands of this sort of design, where the glass is void of detail and texture and hence there is nothing to hide the slightest blemish in the colours, are extreme.

The glass canopy in London’s Hanover Square illustrates well a classic context in which enameled glass can easily be used. It adds an extra element to the public space outside, to the identity and façade of the building itself, and to the experience of entering and leaving the building.

Finally, in the back-lit panel for a private house, we see a classic example of Maestri’s work in a domestic context. Unlike many architectural glass artists, Maestri exhibits at galleries quite regularly, and sells autonomous works that can easily be wall mounted and are already being collected by a discerning few.

Review of solo exhibition at Circus Gallery London

Corinne Julius - journalist, design and applied arts critic.

Kate Maestri's work is inspired by architecture; that is clear in the shapes of the cityscapes she creates in her glass, but it is her own physical and emotional response to the building as sculpture in the landscape, that is translated into her work. Standing in front of one of Maestri's pieces is a powerful and intense experience; she has the ability shared with Anish Kapoor of making thin air into a physical entity, of engaging the viewer so thoroughly that they are bound up in the relationship between themselves and her glass. In her gallery pieces viewers become like 'borrowers' in a floating colour landscape, able to move in and around it. Her newest pieces are based on her frequent walks past the Alexandra and Ainsworth Estate and the Royal National Theatre. Working from her own photos she collages over the structure to create patterns and shapes that give a strong flavour of the building. Using traditional hand-blown glass cooled on tin plates, she creates 3D stained glass in which the colour seems to float without boundaries or framework.

Kate Maestri has a prodigious reputation amongst architects for her extensive and successful collaboration on projects like the Sage Music Centre in Gateshead with Foster and Partners. She thrives on such partnerships finding them intensely stimulating. Maestri's site specific installations interact with her gallery pieces, which often act as maquettes or developmental sketches for subsequent projects. At whatever scale Maestri's pared down work is deceptively simple for the intensity of experience it provokes.
    

Review of ‘Reflect Forward’ solo exhibition at Craft Central London

Fiona Sibley, Design Week

This collection of glass wall sculptures were designed and made during an artist residency at The Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture, London. During the residency Kate discovered the J M Richards Library containing original drawings and architectural details of the Barbican.

This new collection of pieces demonstrates Maestri's technical skill and meditative use of glowing colour. Better known for her large-scale architectural glass works such as the balustrade for the Sage in Gateshead, these one-off and limited-edition pieces incorporate the key elements of her work-colour, light and form. Maestri's three-dimensional art works interpret and abstract the architects' sectional elevations and detailed drawings. She draws inspiration from the buildings themselves, the apartments designed for modern living and the attention given to the smallest detail.

Maestri uses traditionally produced stained glass in a strikingly contemporary manner adding her own slant to the 25th anniversary celebrations of this landmark development conceived with the optimism and excitement of the 1960s.
 Inspired by the overall clarity of the Barbican's design, Maestri has rendered its elevations and sections in warm, human hues, creating a new expression of the building's geometric language. Her minimal, stained-glass panels are mounted upon structural Perspex holders, so each three-dimensional piece hovers above the wall. The result is an abstract, meditative homage to a landmark building.