Berkshire Museum presents Henry Klimowicz: Constructs, on view through March 27, a collection of new and recent work fashioned, through Klimowicz’s distinct, careful method, from cardboard. The centerpiece of Constructs is “Disk II/Bright Star,” a circular work measuring 20-feet in diameter suspended from the ceiling of the Crane Room. Visitors are invited to stand underneath the monolith and examine it from all angles. Other eye-popping Klimowicz works are on view in the Crane Room, as well as the adjacent Jane and Jay Braus Gallery. Klimowicz previously authored Paper and Light, another site-specific installation at Berkshire Museum that is on view in the Wider Window Gallery.
Klimowicz begins with disused cardboard and methodically transforms it into large-scale pieces, incorporating intricate patterns that suggest the work of bees, insects, and spiders. They display meticulous attention to detail and a meditative quality that encourages the viewer to engage at several levels, considering the artist’s process and the time invested in the work as well as its interplay between the concepts of waste and of aesthetic beauty. The work is playful and accessible, and implies a dialogue between art and the natural world that places it firmly within Berkshire Museum’s nexus of art, science and natural history.
“If I can make a beautiful thing from cardboard, I have then said that anything can be made valuable, fruitful, or hopeful,” he says. “ I see the work as very positive because of the lengths that have been traveled by the material from trash to beauty. It is a statement about the possible—that all things can be redeemed, often for more then what was deposited. And that creativity can be that redeemer.
Berkshire Museum
39 South Street (Route 7)
Pittsfield, MA 01201
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