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Confectioners around the world love to work with sugar. After all, this material can be used to create desserts that marry both great taste and an alluring design. Berlin-based artist Joseph Marr has turned sugar on its head, creating sculptures with sugar due to its unique visual features. These aren't detailed desserts but rather works of art meant to be admired—and resisted.
Many sculptures work with materials such as clay or marble, but to Marr, these traditional resources weren't cutting it. “The visual aspect of [sugar] is that it's just very attractive,” the artist told Great Big Story. “It's just colorful, glass-like material. Makes you want to touch it and eat it, and have it. And that's quite interesting as a substance because paint doesn't do that, bronze doesn't do that, but you have an experience of sugar daily.”
The artist draws a connection between glucose and a shifting identity within ourselves throughout the day. “From being sleepy to excited, from wanting—wanting more money, wanting more power, wanting more security in your life. Those wants are represented really well with sugar, so it's quite like this ubiquitous material that says a lot.”
The material complements the message of desire nicely, particularly in pieces such as Vanitas and Vania vs. Vania, which explore the fleeting nature of life through female bodies.
But for all the visual allure of sugar, Marr never expected people to try to eat his sculpture. The idea was so distant that many of his pieces have been exhibited without a protective encasing. After seeing people licking the artwork, he remembered thinking, “What are you doing? You don't know who's licked it before. Like, what?” adding the sobering thought that nobody gave it a second thought. “It was weird.”
Yet, the artist loves the look on viewers' faces when they realize the sculptures in front of them are made of sugar. To him, knowing what it's made of brings the audience closer to the work.
However, it's not all about taking and wanting; after all, sugar can be fragile, too. Marr's latest piece, Open Heart, is an 800 kg sugar sculpture of a human heart. But rather than trying to get a sweet kick out of it, viewers were meant to give back to it. To keep it from melting, viewers had to ride generator bikes to power its air conditioner. The piece was on view until October 6 at Berlin's Park am Gleisdreieck.
To stay up to date with Marr's sugar sculptures, you can follow him on Instagram.
Berlin-based artist Joseph Marr creates visually alluring sculptures made out of an unexpected material—sugar.
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Many sculptures work with other materials such as clay or marble, but to Marr, these traditional resources weren't cutting it.
Ver esta publicación en Instagram
“The visual aspect of [sugar] is that it's just very attractive,” the artist said. “It's just colorful, glass-like material. Makes you want to touch it and eat it, and have it.”
Ver esta publicación en Instagram
Ver esta publicación en Instagram
But for all the visual allure of sugar, Marr never expected people to try to eat his sculpture. “It was weird,” he said.
Ver esta publicación en Instagram
Marr's latest piece, Open Heart, is an 800 kg sugar sculpture of a human heart. Viewers were meant to save it by jumping on a generator bike to power its air conditioner.
Ver esta publicación en Instagram
Learn more about Marr's use of sugar to create his sculptures and his thoughts on people's reactions to the art.
Joseph Marr: Website | Instagram
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