Glow House: Stained Glass Hut by Tom Fruin
Understated by day, this house-shaped art installation comes alive at night with a dazzling spectrum of projected colors. Illuminated from the inside, it casts beautiful light on the brick-paved ground of the public square around it.
New York artist Tom Fruin put this piece on display alongside the water on a plaza in Copenhagen, at once an out-of-place abstraction and a contextual response to the multi-colored lights found downtown at night.
Thousand of Plexiglas scraps went into its construction, culled from closed-down factories and dumpster-diving expeditions in the area – they were then meticulously assembled within a dark framework providing structural support and visual boundaries.
“Tom Fruin Studio is pleased to present Kolonihavehus, a new sculptural artwork by Brooklyn artist Tom Fruin. For the first scultpure in his internationally recognized Icon series, Fruin has created a garden house in colorful salvaged plexiglas and steel. The work takes its name and inspiration from Copenhagen’s ubiquitous kolonihavehus: a modest garden shed originally intended to give state workers a refuge from cramped living conditions in the city. The Icon series can be seen as a three-dimensional evolution of Fruin’s found drug-bag quilts and flags for which he is well known.”
“Fruin, who often works with reclaimed and discarded materials, has composed Kolonihavehus from roughly one thousand scraps of plexiglas. It includes such details as a pivot mouted door with hand-made hinges and several operable windows. The locally-sourced plexi came from all over Copenhagen: a defunct plexiglas distributorship, a closing picture framing shop, the basement of the Danish State Art Workshops, and the dumpsters outside the Danish Architecture Center.”
“Tom Fruin (b. 1974) works in Brooklyn, NY. His work is a part of many international museums and collections, most notably The Hanck Collection at the Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf, Germany; the Richard J. Massey Foundation for Arts and Sciences in New York, NY; and the Buenos Aires Design Center (Centro Metropolitano de Diseño) in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Fruin’s most recent work in the Icon series is the 20 foot tall Watertower in DUMBO, Brooklyn.”
