When you look upon the glass work of Michael Kofod, you truly understand how he has become the artist he is.
The goal seems to have been determined from the very beginning: how is it possible for a piece of art to seek nature, not only to look like nature, but in some ways to become nature?
A painting can more or less succeed in imitating nature, but a canvas will always be a two-dimensional object, so the naturalness can only stay an illusion.
On the contrary, a piece of crude glass is a piece of nature, and Michael Kofod must have thought, what if you instead of creating art ware with all its beautiful colors and shapes, that such can have, create something that in a more structural sense resembles nature?
Michael Kofod had to think outside the box and ended up with two technical solutions for his challenge: crazing, often in several layers, and with transparent glass in the final work of art. The result is a piece of glass art with a three-dimensional collage effect with several layers of crazing creating a structure that astoundingly resembles nature: the weather, geological sedimentary rock, material processes and solid and flowing elements. To put briefly, all the things and phenomena we call nature.
For example, the ocean. Michael Kofod has created plates, lamps and bowls, that in its color and structure resembles waves, waves crushing and seafoam, either seen from the height of the waves or looked upon as from a space probe with the blue ocean covered in white fluffy clouds. He has created lamps, which makes you think of the glowing organisms in the deep sea, and he has experimented with azure-colored plates and bowls, which leads your mind to the beautiful underwater caves in the Mediterranean Sea.
If we move on to fire, Michael Kofod has created glass art with a surface that seems so much like molten lava, that you almost fear burning your fingers touching it. With the series ”Fleezy Clouds” he has created bowls that imitate a mackerel sky, and he has, to finish off with the last of the fundamental elements, earth, fabricated glass art, which resembles the multicolored layers of ancient rock formations.
Whether Michael Kofod works with the four fundamental elements, makes abstract art or moves towards figurative naturalism, his exquisite sense for material, his ability to create glowing, whirling and dashing structure in a vast number of color combinations, is what makes his glass art so fascinating.
Tom Jørgensen, art historian, art critic at i.a. Jyllands-Posten, editor of Kunstavisen
