BIOGRAPHY

Alan Glass was born in Montréal, Canada in 1932. At the precocious age of seventeen, he enrolled in l’École des beaux-arts, where he studied for the painter Alfred Pellan. Just a few weeks ahead of his twentieth birthday, in June 1952, Glass embarked for Paris to continue his studies in art with the aid of a scholarship from the French government. The decade he spent in Paris proved to be formative. In 1954, he first picked up a ballpoint pen, a then-recent invention that could be used with unparalleled speed and agility, and developed a highly original automatic drawing practice. Conjuring forth lush organic shapes with his humble Bic pens, Glass created stunning vistas somewhere between the figurative and the abstract. When his drawings were discovered by the Parisian surrealists, Glass was introduced to André Breton, whom he would visit from time to time in his studio at 42 rue Fontaine. Together with the poet Benjamin Péret, Breton organized Glass’s first solo exhibition at Galerie le Terrain Vague in January 1958. During his time in Paris, Glass also became close friends with Aube Breton-Elléouët as well as fellow Canadian expatriates including Jean Benoît, Mimi Parent, and Roland Giguère.

In the early 1960s, Glass first started making the assemblages for which he is most well-known. Drawing on the rich history of the surrealist object – from Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, to Meret Oppenheim and Joseph Cornell, and on to later developments by Parent and Adrien Dax – Glass quickly developed a distinctive assemblage practice, marked equally by its atmosphere of the sacred and his idiosyncratic sense of humor and wit.

Glass first visited Mexico in 1961, prompted in large part by the sight of a Mexican sugar skull in the studio of Aube Breton-Elléouët. He ended up staying a year. Once back in Paris, where rising costs of living made life as an artist increasingly challenging, he quickly felt the pull to go back to Mexico. By 1963, he had settled in Mexico City, where he resided for the rest of his life. Through his friend Alejandro Jodorowsky, Glass got to know Leonora Carrington. Soon he became an integral part of the local surrealist circle, which also included artists such as Bridget Bate Tichenor and Pedro Friedeberg. Glass thrived in Mexico City but kept travelling extensively, and he often spent part of the year in Montréal and Paris.

During his travels, as well as at home in Mexico City, Glass would scour flea markets and curiosity stores, amassing a vast collection of raw materials for his boxed assemblages. In his works, old clocks, advertisements, toys, maps, tools, lightbulbs, tufts of hair, mushrooms, insects, eggs, embroidery, seeds, and much, much more are arranged in dazzling new constellations, obeying the associative dictates of surrealist poetry to provide an escape route from the disenchanted conventional ordering of the world.

Throughout his six decades of making objects, Glass’s practice constantly evolved. In the mid-1960s, he constructed a series of reliquary-themed boxes, which were exhibited at the legendary Galería de Antonio Souza in early 1967. When he showed a series of boxes that appear to depict experiences of esoteric enlightenment at Galería Pecanins in 1972, Jodorowsky pounced on the opportunity to film them. He ended up using Glass’s art to unsettling effect in his cult film The Holy Mountain (1973). Just a few years later, in 1976, Glass held his first major retrospective at Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City. He returned to the museum with the comprehensive exhibition Zurcidos invisibles in 2008, showcasing his full range of ever-inventive works in two and three dimensions. Alongside these exhibitions, Glass showed his work in such notable places as Galerie du Siècle in Montréal, Galerie 1900–2000 in Paris, and Galería López Quiroga in Mexico City.

Glass’s art is characterized by its many layers of poetic connections. One distinctive feature is his creation of allusive networks of visual and verbal quotes, through which he pays tribute to poets, artists, and writers of importance to him. He devoted several pieces to the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, incorporating reproductions of Friedrich’s works and expanding on their meaning through visual manipulations or the addition of imaginatively chosen added elements. Pharmacie (2003) is a Friedrich-inspired take on Marcel Duchamp’s famous 1914 work of the same name, connecting two artists from different eras through Glass’s poetic sensibilities. He also paid tribute to his friend André Breton, notably by interpreting his concept l’or du temps, “the gold of time” or “outside of time,” as a golden ship suspended in a birdcage in Vers l’or du temps (2002). Other works evoke the art or lives of fellow surrealists including Meret Oppenheim, Man Ray, and Remedios Varo. In one of the very last boxes he completed, Glass managed to realize his longstanding ambition to pay tribute to Henri Rousseau’s 1908 painting The Football Players. Combining a postcard reproduction of the painting with the claws of a lobster Glass received as a gift from Friedeberg, the box weaves together Rousseau, one of Glass’s cherished forerunners, with Friedeberg, Glass’s contemporary and friend.

Alongside his work in assemblage, Glass continued to devote himself to the two-dimensional side of his practice. Dazzlingly detailed, his paintings often depict cosmic sceneries featuring celestial bodies, temple-like buildings, and a myriad of teeming humans and animals crowded together, metamorphosing. His drawings, silverpoints, and prints tend to allude to mediumistic powers of seeing, conjuring forth ectoplasmic effusions, ghostly faces, and a sense of nature as animated from within.

Glass was remarkably productive all the way to the end of his life. As Susan Aberth has noted, his boxes “appear strikingly contemporary” in their “arresting juxtapositions of words, objects and images.” In his final years, Glass’s art was as complex, mysterious, and witty as ever. He discovered an unexpected attraction to bright yellows, peopled his boxes with playful and inquisitive ravens and blackbirds, and probed the mystery of death and resurrection through references to the tarot and Mathias Grünewald’s Isenheim altarpiece. Time and memory, the flight of bees and myths of pagan goddesses, visionary experience and the joys of unusual toys, the dire state of the world and possibilities of its transformation – these elements and many more coexist in Glass’s boxes. They contain worlds constructed like mysterious and witty poems.

-Kristoffer Noheden, 18 July and 26 August 2024