Stine Bidstrup

Stine Bidstrup is a Danish glass artist and art historian whose practice delves into the ideology of optical phenomena and theories of both chaos and utopia. Working across studios in Denmark and Sweden, Bidstrup’s sculptures are made from mouth-blown colored glass fitted to plaster molds while in a molten state. They emerge from their molds as craggy architectural models and jagged artificial landscapes. Utilizing technology in conjunction with traditional techniques, Bidstrup often produces digital prints on the interiors of her sculptures. She applies scrawled lines, intricate networks, and map-like web patterns in this manner, allowing drawn forms to show through beneath layers of glass.

Bidstrup’s interest in the early twentieth-century utopian teachings of Paul Scheerbart and the architect Bruno Taut’s visionary proposals serves as a foundation for her forms as well as the thrust of her philosophical inquiry. The materiality and vibrant hues of her glass sculptures recall many of Taut’s drawings while materializing the fantastical literary descriptions of floating crystal cities detailed in Scheerbart’s 1914 manifesto Glasarchitektur. These historic meditations on urban planning occurred at the onset of World War I and, as such, were never realized—a fact that provides Bidstrup with ample room to reinterpret their ideas in her series “Architectural Glass Fantasies,” produced over a century later.

Bidstrup has taught at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art’s School of Design on Bornholm since 2009, and was a visiting lecturer at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2015. Together with fellow Copenhagen-based glass artists, she founded the collaborative studio Luftkraft Glass Studio in 2007, and has exhibited nationally and worldwide for the past 15 years. In 2018, Bidstrup joined the exhibition council at the Glass Museum Ebeltoft, and in 2021, she was selected as the curator of the 8th Tallinn Applied Art Triennial.