Michael Petry: Touching the Neoclassical and the Romantic

About

Multi-media artist Michael Petry has been invited to exhibit in the Museum a series of works which explore the transformative quality of glass — itself a material that is somewhere between the solid and liquid states. Taking found metal vessels, whose forms distantly echo the silver designs of such architects as Robert Adam which are represented in the collection, molten glass (at about 1 000 c.) is then poured into them, often spilling over or forcing its way through apertures. The glass is then allowed to anneal, or cool down to room temperature, in a furnace over the period of twenty-four hours so that it bonds with the metal without cracking and retains its liquid-like quality. The resultant scorched and buckled vessels, which have been interspersed amongst the Museum's collections, become just as emblematic of entropy, or decay, as the fragments of antiquities, the models of classical architecture shown in ruins or indeed Soane's own buildings, such as the Bank of England, depicted in drawings as they might be chanced upon by architects many hundreds of years into the future. This exhibition will be followed in February 2011 with an installation of work which will take the more Romantic and ‘gothic' aspects Soane's later architectural style as their point of reference. Appropriately, Petry's installations coincide with the restoration of the Museum's significant holdings of historical, figurative stained glass panels which will be returned to their original locations as Soane intended. Petry's work is a contemporary exploration of the skills and artistry of earlier glass craftsmen and this exhibition echoes and continues Sir John Soane's ambition to support British artists and crafts.