New York, NY—Berlin-based artist Monika Grzymala has completed Volumen, her large-scale installation at the Morgan Library & Museum. The work opens to the public tomorrow and will remain on view through November 3, 2013.
Volumen is composed of five thousand irregular sheets of paper handmade by the artist with mulberry fiber in her Berlin studio. Three thousand shimmering white sheets are combined with two thousand sheets printed with images from the Morgan’s collections of literary, music, and historical manuscripts.
The sheets are connected to hundreds of strands of bookbinding yarn suspended from a nearly invisible net of monofilament line hanging from the ceiling of the museum’s glass-enclosed, 50-foot-high Gilbert Court. The longest of the strands have been gathered by the artist and pulled diagonally towards the south side of the Court, near the entrance to Pierpont Morgan’s iconic 1906 library. The pages that reproduce manuscripts from the Morgan’s collections—concentrated near the library—gradually blend with the white sheets of paper, creating a cloud-like sculpture totaling one thousand cubic meters or 36,615 cubic feet.
MONIKA GRZYMALA
Monika Grzymala (German, b. 1970 in Poland) is celebrated for her site-specific works that are grounded in drawing but expand into three dimensions. The artist works with ephemeral materials—including tape, handmade paper, and objects found locally—to create site-specific, temporary, and ephemeral “architectural interventions” based on the vocabulary of line.
Grzymala has participated in many international group exhibitions, including On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2010. Her solo exhibitions and site-specific projects have taken place throughout Europe, Japan, Australia, Canada, and the United States.
Between 2008 and 2010 Grzymala created two large-scale installations with handmade Washi paper titled Up There Up Here for a private residence in Manhattan. She will soon begin work on another site-specific commission, a sculpture garden for the rooftop of the Woodner Company building in New York City.