Harp

Mouth blown Murano glass rods, hand carved and coated with variable size crystal
Photos: Claire de Virieu

HARPE / 2015

The 3 section represent the voices and names of the collectors children. The tree is a Mediterranean pine tree, in order to prevent the tree to collapse, each section contains a 10 thick iron rod. All glass pieces are mouth blown and hand carved in Murano, Venice. The color has been mixed especially for this purpose and contains a crystal coating.

Time, light, sound and nature are brought together in beautiful harmony. Harp is, like Sesamo, a highly personalized and emotive piece and is bursting with colour, passion and potential. The collector’s children recited their own names and the sound waves were recorded and represented in hand blown Murano glass tubes. These are set on iron rods which prevent an old tree from collapsing; representing the youth supporting the older generation. The texture of the glass resembles the bark of the trunk; symbolizing the similarities passed down through family. With the different lights of day the unique red colour appears alive; the work changes as the glass fluctuates from flaming bright to glowing warm or fading into darkness. These works have immeasurable variation and potential.

AREAARTE magazine - fall 2023

Text by Francesca de Medici - extract

…Cause and effect. Positive and negative. Empty and full. Opposites lookingfor each other, and sometimes converging, are found. Themes dear to Janine Thüngen-Reichenbach, as are space, time and sound, impossible to contain in rigid definitions or vacuum compress. Born in Germany but Venetian by adoption and citizen of the world, Janine is above all a multifaceted creature with chronic curiosity and a very subtle sense of humor, whose artistic and conceptual challenge is, in the words of Bruno Corà, “ambitious and daring, those that allow an artist to open a breach in the dark Dantean forest of contemporary production of meaning.”

Janine’s vision has always been multifaceted and multi-directional, exploring and combining different materials such as bronze, glass, wire, paper, lead, clay and rubber passing to hemp and stroking with the wind even the sound. Her works can be composed of small elements - like the “New Yorkers”, characters who chase the sidewalks of the “city that never sleeps” as if they were a rolling human carpet - or scale up and become portable sculptures to become monumental presences, sophisticated and flowery land art or sound installations. The latter emphasize and celebrate the sublime interaction between human beings and nature and between nature and time, where sculpture becomes a fusion, a personification of time and space, a series of moments each of which has its own value, its own existence, and in which works and users are in partnership with the artist. Magnum opus is “Harpe (Harp)” (I), an iron work covered in mouth blown Murano glass, hand carved and covered in crystal, where each section represents the harmonic sound wave of the voices and the names of the children of the customers. Bob Dylan already said: “The answer is to blowing in the wind”; and Janine did…