North Carolina Museum of Art

2022

Installation view, Bride, North Carolina Museum of Art, photo credit: North Carolina Museum of Art

This five-tiered, 10-foot-tall still life cascades down from perfect order to total chaos, as the more than 500 individual glass elements that make up this sculpture are knocked over, slumped, broken, melted, and shattered by the time they reach the bottom tier. This multilayered, crystal-clear still life alludes to the layers of a wedding cake or an elaborate bridal gown. It was inspired by a variety of still lifes in the NCMA’s collection, including a 17th-century German silver cup by Paulus Fischer and workshop; a plate of fish that appears in Pieter Aertsen’s 16th-century market scene painting A Meat Stall, as well as in David Salle’s painting The Emperor from 2000; the cat and bird in Frans Snyders’s 17th-century painting Market Scene on a Quay; a candlestick from Bernardo Strozzi’s 17th-century painting St. Lawrence Distributing the Treasures of the Church; and the 19th-century Ottoman Esther Scroll and Case from the Judaic collection. Although the wedding-related subject matter is specific to Bride, many of Lipman’s pieces explore ideas of human abundance and its impact on the environment.