Edmund de Waal
steel light I-V, 2019
Porcelain, steel, and gold
© Edmund de Waal. Courtesy the artist and The Frick Collection. Photo: Christopher Burke
We're in the West Vestibule, that incredible Boulle table, that dense, dark, thinking though with different materials, and Boucher around you, and this extraordinary raking west light coming in.
And so here are five solid, beautiful, black steel grounds. Heavy things, on which to make sculpture. Black porcelain on each, and then leaning, these very, very, very thin, almost shard-like pieces of steel, milled to a sixteenth of an inch thick. Some gilded, some with this beautiful gray-blue patina to them.
And it's balance. It's balance, equilibrium, it's trying to find how light comes in, how it moves around, how shadows work.
So it's a sculpture for light; for changing light for that particular place.