Christopher Wilmarth

My Divider, 1972-73

Glass and steel
60 x 78 x 94 in. (152.4 x 198.1 x 238.8 cm.)

(c)The Estate of Christopher Wilmarth

Artist, poet, and songwriter Christopher Wilmarth was powerfully affected by the experience of walking through New York City and encountering the play of light on the surfaces of the city’s skyscrapers and bridges. He saw his sculptures as places to generate experiences with light that could echo those moments in his own life, when light became entwined with memory, and hoped through his art to “return them to the world as a physical poem.” The glass in My Divider, etched with painterly strokes, captures the light that passes through it, softly glowing against the dark steel plates that make up the rest of its form.

Wilmarth’s literary influences ranged from Mark Twain’s stories of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer to the poetry of 19^th-century French Symbolist Stéphane Mallarmé. As a poet himself, Wilmarth strongly identified with Mallarmé’s verses, as he described in 1982: “[Mallarmé’s] imagination and reverie meant more to him than anything that was actually of this world. His work is about the anguish and longing of experience not fully realized, and I found something of myself in it.” Wilmarth produced a suite of seven etchings in response to English translations of Mallarmé’s poetry in 1978 and would go on to produce a series of blown-glass sculptures titled Breath in the early 1980s that were inspired by the translated poems of Mallarmé. 

Exhibition:

May 20 - August 13, 2017

Coinciding with the exhibition Roni Horn, the Nasher Sculpture Center’s curators have chosen works from the Nasher Collection to complement Horn’s installation and draw connections between Horn and artists of the distant and more recent past. Horn is an avid reader and frequently includes excerpts of literary texts in the subtitles of her works, as with her cast glass sculptures on view in the adjacent gallery. Literary themes appear prominently in other bodies of work too, notably in Horn’s drawings, in which the artist combines excerpts from literature with idiomatic phrases, and also in a series of aluminum sculptures in which the artist embeds the words of poet Emily Dickinson.