NEW YORK, NY.- The Jewish Museum will present a selection of colorful, luminous lamps designed by internationally renowned architect Frank Gehry in Fish Forms: Lamps by Frank Gehry, on view from August 29 through October 31, 2010. This exhibition also explores the significance of fish imagery in Gehry’s work. The lamps will be displayed in near darkness to create a gallery of glowing sculptural fish lit from within.
In 1983, Frank Gehry was asked by the Formica Corporation to make something with a new laminate product called ColorCore. When Gehry broke a piece, the resulting shards reminded him of fish scales and gave him the idea for the fish lamps. Gehry made a prototype and then turned to New City Editions, a studio located next door to his, to fabricate the lamps, each of which he designed and approved. About thirty lamps were created between 1984 and 1986. To construct the lamps a wood model of the fish shape was made and a wire armature was stretched over it. The wire was cut to remove the wood and resoldered, and then shards of ColorCore were glued to the armature. Some lamps incorporated larger shards of ColorCore to form a base that concealed light bulbs. Around 1990, a version of the fish lamp was made using pieces of thin plate glass.
This exhibition brings together eight of Frank Gehry’s fish lamps, including a glass lamp in the collection of The Jewish Museum. An accompanying slide show presents an overview of how the fish form has changed from iconic symbol to transformative object in Gehry’s ongoing architectural practice.
All fish lamps were designed by Frank O. Gehry and fabricated by New City Editions, Venice, California. The exhibition was organized by Ruth Beesch, Deputy Director for Program at The Jewish Museum. “The lamps are beautiful, whimsical works from a mind of great ingenuity and creativity,” said Ms. Beesch. “They are a fantastic blending of idea and material with the translucent shards perfectly fulfilling Gehry’s artistic vision,” she added.
Fish forms have been an indelible and vibrant element in Frank Gehry’s architecture since the 1980s. Fish embodied his desire to create motion in architecture and represented a perfection that he could never realize in his buildings. At a time when architects were inspired by ancient Greek temples, Gehry said, “If you really want to go back into the past, why not do fish?” At the Walker Art Center in 1986, Gehry said: “In Toronto, when I was very young, my grandmother and I used to go to Kensington, a Jewish market, on Thursday morning. She would buy a carp for gefilte fish. She’d put it in the bathtub, fill the bathtub with water, and this big black carp…would swim around in the bathtub and I would play with it.”
Born Frank Goldberg in Toronto, Canada in 1929, Gehry, is widely considered to be the most original and innovative practitioner in architecture today. His father moved his family to a mining town in Ontario, where he supplied establishments with slot machines. After gaming became illegal, the family eventually relocated to Los Angeles, where Gehry attended architecture school at the University of Southern California. Before graduating he changed his name; he had been picked on as a child and wanted to be admitted to the university’s architectural fraternity. At the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Gehry discovered Le Corbusier: “That’s when I threw away the grid system and just said, man, there’s another freedom out there.” Returning to California, Gehry built a commercial practice fed by the urban sprawl of Los Angeles. In 1977-78, Gehry renovated a small house for his family in Santa Monica, using inexpensive industrial materials and subjecting its elements to various degrees to deconstruction. The house clarified his ambitions and led him to reduce his commercial business to concentrate on an increasingly sculptural approach to architecture.
Frank Gehry is Design Principal for the firm of Frank O. Gehry and Associates, Inc., which he established in 1962. His work has earned Mr. Gehry several of the most significant awards in the architectural field. His buildings have received over 100 national and regional American Institute of Architects (A.I.A.) awards. Noted architecture critic Paul Goldberger wrote in The New York Times that Mr. Gehry’s “buildings are powerful essays in primal geometric form and…materials, and from an aesthetic standpoint they are among the most profound and brilliant works of architecture of our time.” Recent projects have included: the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Bilbao, Spain; and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, California.
