Collection Development

Living With Art: Tomás Saraceno Sculpture

Great art isn’t static. It transforms the room in which it’s placed and sometimes every object that surrounds it. Such is the case with this Tomás Saraceno sculpture “Flammagenitus/M+I,” which produces an endless array of shapes, colors, and light projections for one Weingarten Art Group client. Over the past two years, in fact, our client has shared each of the photos you’ll see in this blog, sending us a text out of the blue, delighting in how the artwork dances and impacts the space around it in continually unexpected ways.

The sculpture is suspended, its shape reminiscent of a cloud. “Flammagenitus” refers to a unique type of cumulus cloud caused by heat from wildfires or volcanic eruptions. Like its namesake, the sculpture, made of dichroic glass, blazes outward in brilliant color, shining light on everything from the ceiling, walls, and floor, to other artworks – including a sweet Ann Craven painting nearby.

Light has connotations in art history from the religious (stained glass) to the scientific, and this sculpture delivers on both. It has the special ability to inspire wonder and bring joy to daily life. It may also offer a lesson to us, in our socially-distanced lives. Like the sculpture, we too can be a source of illumination for those around us. 

Tomás Saraceno is an Argentinian artist currently based in Berlin. His works combine art, architecture, engineering, and the natural sciences through which he explores new ways of inhabiting and sensing the environment around us.