Irèn Handschuh: Diminutive/Monumental 

Please join us on Thursday, October 16 at 6pm for a Fredi Schiff Levin Lecture with Megan Hinton, Paul Bowen, Sky Power, and Janice Redman. $15 Museum admission, free for PAAM members.

“Sculpture is the poetry of shape, the sculptor a poet of shape”. -Irèn Handschuh (1951-2025)

Diminutive/Monumental presents Handschuh’s multiple bodies of lyrical sculptural work spanning four decades. The work reveals notions of strength and fragility in media of glass, wood, and found material. 

The French-born long-time Wellfleet, Massachusetts artist culled elements from personal and intimate experience to recontextualize a shared intimacy with her viewers. Handschuh’s wall, freestanding, and mobile sculptures, whether small or large in scale, convey a sense of monumentality. Irèn’s choice of material evokes sensory memory: glass from her native France, olive pits from an aperitif hour, found wood, colored glass water bottles, and acupuncture needles form the artist’s abstractions. These signal a life lived by feeling and observation: colored glass to key up the Cape Cod light, needles to heal the body, floors once walked upon, fruit pits rolled in the mouth to draw maximum flavor, or bottles to quench the artist’s thirst.   

Some of Handschuh’s wood was sourced from the olive trees of her family’s home in Provence, again marking her material as autobiographical.  Simultaneously engaged with memory and form the artist often pondered what declares a piece finished. This was an intuitive process involving the logic of trial and error to find resolution and a convincing balance that achieves an apparent ease of effort.  Pieces seem to support each other and to symbolize the integration of the artist’s family and friends.

Since the mid-1990s, Handschuh has worked with dalle de verre, or “glass slab,” a technique that employs pieces of colored glass set in a matrix of concrete resin.  Handschuh attended a workshop in 1995 near the gothic Chartres Cathedral in France called Le Centre International Du Vitrail à Chartres/International Stained-Glass Center.  She was interested in the three-dimensional challenge of constructing and balancing glass. Glass work is a significant historic craft in France. Perhaps it is also a translucent metaphor for the fragility, self-consciousness, and enlightenment associated with being an artist.

With a carbide edged hammer, Handschuh chipped and shaped pieces of glass into form, often wrapping pieces with copper and soldering them together to construct a piece.  Handschuh spoke of the challenges of color.  She did not consider herself a colorist and in some cases reduced certain glass sculptures to just values of black and transparent white or the addition of a single color as in the Chi Series from 2013. The series was inspired by the artist’s introduction to acupuncture in Paris.  She said, “That was when I had the idea to use the needles from my treatments in my sculptures. The Chi Series are rotating balanced mobiles.”

Handschuh’s glass appears lifted, floating vulnerably on a pin below its sister structure providing weight and balance, where only a tiny point reiterates the gravity of its support. What is not seen in a still image is the nuanced movement that occurs between the needle and the glass components. A subtle bouncing is witnessed. Movement is extended into Handschuh’s large scale ceiling-hung glass and wire mobiles in flux to defy a tradition of the statuesque in sculpture. 

Irèn Handschuh’s materials convey a diaristic experience set free from functional purpose to exist in the harmony and tension of sculptural space. Irèn fused material by means of soldering, carving, tacking, and joinery into transformative assemblages. She was a formalist sculptor who focused on shape, line, texture, and color in non-objective terms. With these tools in hand Irèn Handschuh made typically unseen energy forces sculpturally visible. Her extensive diminutive and monumental body of work carries the life force and legacy of a distinctive contemporary sculptor. 

-Megan Hinton, 2025