Henry Klimowicz: Constructs to open at the Berkshire Museum

An enormous, engaging new site-specific work utilizing the most humble of materials has been created in the Ellen Crane Memorial Room in the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Mass., part of Henry Klimowicz: Constructs, a new exhibition opening Saturday.

The installation—a disk twenty feet in diameter and made from four and a half miles of quarter-inch wide strips of ordinary cardboard, wound into whorls and hot-glued together—is the breathtaking centerpiece of the brilliant new show of present and past works, all crafted by Henry Klimowicz from unassuming corrugated cardboard strips.

With the title Disk II/Bright Star, the huge circle of densely textured, light brown cardboard is delicately suspended from the ceiling on slender wires; it hovers between floor and ceiling, nearly filling the space, at a gentle slope. Viewers can walk under the shelter of the floating disk, walk behind it, or examine it from the side. The work appears to be dense and strong or fragile and lace-like, depending on the viewing angle. It is a monumental object, fascinating in the way it is crafted and in the way it floats and monopolizes the Crane Room.

Artist Henry Klimowicz has been sculpting with cardboard since 1986. “Cardboard is simple and straightforward. It is also a severely limited material. It has an ever-present cultural bias related to its past uses as a container or its present use as waste. I love that when I fully use the material it transcends its cultural confines,” Klimowicz says. “If I can make a beautiful thing from cardboard, I have then said that anything can be made valuable, fruitful, or hopeful. I see the work as very positive because of the lengths that have been traveled by the material from trash to beauty. It is a statement about the possible—that all things can be redeemed, often for more than what was deposited. And that creativity can be that redeemer.”

Opposite the disk installation are two wall-mounted works, Milky Way #1 and Milky Way #2, each one comprising hundreds of small constellations spinning across the wall. Twisted, formed, crushed, cut and glued, the unique stars, asteroids, and meteors are all made of corrugated coardboard.

On the last two walls in the Crane Room are five pieces from Klimowicz's Circle series; each six-and-a-half-feet in diameter, all are made from cardboard strips and each one is different, from a surface of slender spiky tails to a series of flat fish scales to swirling whorls of the corrugated material. 

There are ten more Klimowicz works in the adjacent Jane and Jay Braus Gallery. Additional pieces from the Circle series are hung here, as well as a number of massive rectangles, also wall-mounted, that are denser and more thickly textured than the circles; they include scales, swirls, and tube-like shapes. The works are active and engaging, reminiscent of organic structures from nature: honey combs or wasps’ nest or elaborate coral reefs.

Klimowicz previously created Paper and Light, another site-specific installation still on view that features cardboard webs and tendrils that cascade down through the stairwell in the Wider Window Gallery.

Henry Klimowicz: Constructs opens Saturday, January 15, with a reception from 5 to 7 p.m.; the event is free and open to the public.

The exhibition will be on view at Berkshire Museum, 39 South St., Pittsfield, from January 15 through March 27. For more information, visit www.berkshiremuseum.org or call 413.443.7171.

Klimowicz will guide visitors as they create their own cardboard art, when on February 12, 19, and 26, he will be in the galleries from 2 to 3 pm for a Hands-on Workshop with Henry Klimowicz. These special workshops are appropriate for all ages and materials are provided. Participation is included with regular museum admission.