AACG - Art Alliance for Contemporary Glass

Stine Bidstrup

About Stine Bidstrup

Danish artist Stine Bidstrup’s work explores optical phenomena and interprets utopic social and architectural ideas. Demonstrating a delicate balance of technique, artistic vision and intellect, her sculptures are winning ever increasing attention from collectors as well as critical, press, and peer recognition. Now Stine’s career has reached a moment where achievement and recognition are converging. Last year one of her Architectural Glass Fantasies sculptures was acquired by the Toledo Museum of Art for their permanent collection, and this year her Bifurcation sculpture is included in the important New Glass Now exhibition at the Corning Museum of Glass. Very recently Stine’s won another honor, Denmark’s most prestigious arts award, a 3-Year Work Grant from the Danish Arts Foundation. The DAF’s (translated) announcement explains what convinced them to bestow this award:

"Stine Bidstrup's fascinating sculptural glassworks draw inspiration from the history of architecture and design and are based on a very high level of craftsmanship, which makes it possible for her to work freely in the material and involve several layers of meaning. At her first solo NYC Heller Gallery exhibition in the fall of 2018, she showed an impressive range of works from the Architectural Glass Fantasies series, where her starting point was to interpret utopian ideas through optical phenomena. Stine Bidstrup's works have grown in size and expression over the past few years and are now both impressive and innovative - she is standing on the verge of an international breakthrough. Against this background, we in the Danish Arts Foundation award her a 3-Year Work Grant for immersion, idea development, and creation of new personal works."

In 2013 Bidstrup started work on her Architectural Glass Fantasies series, which is inspired by The Crystal Chain, a correspondence project initiated by German architect Bruno Taut and influenced by his mentor, German writer and utopian fabulist Paul Scheerbart. In the aftermath of World War I, Taut invited a small group of architects to exchange letters and drawings on what form the architecture of the future should take. In their correspondence participants described their utopic ideas of beneficent architecture and visions for an ideal society built out of colored glass and steel. Bidstrup’s sculptures are based on these ideas about glass architecture and about the colossal impact the Crystal Chain correspondents imagined it could have on society. Her work is driven by her curiosity to understand and visually interpret the construction, scope, and complexity of utopic ideas through glass. Giving physical form to ideas that were intended only as a philosophical exercise, Bidstrup says that her sculptures can be regarded as a type of an architectural model, suggesting a transformation of scale in the imagination of the viewer.

Stine Bidstrup graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art, School of Design on Bornholm and continued her studies at the Rhode Island School of Design. Since 2009 she has taught at her alma mater in Bornholm. She has been a visiting lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and at the Pilchuck Glass School and took part in residencies in Estonia, Finland, India, Norway, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Bidstrup has exhibited internationally for the past decade. She is a founding member of the Copenhagen-based collaborative Luftkraft Glass Studio. Bidstrup’s work is held in distinguished public collections in the United States and Europe, and she is represented by the Heller Gallery in New York City.

Read more about her in this article from appeal magazine.

Acknowledgment of Gallery:
We are grateful to Heller Gallery, New York, New York, for providing the Artist of the Month.