Glittery
Sparkling surfaces made with glitter, sequins, crushed glass, mica or gold, catching light as the viewer moves.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for Glittery are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
Sparkle has long signalled the precious and the sacred. Medieval altarpieces glint with gold leaf and tooled haloes, Byzantine mosaicists set glass tesserae at slight angles so walls flicker in candlelight, and Japanese artists scattered gold and silver flakes across screens and lacquer. Mica powder gave some ukiyo-e portrait prints a shimmering background in the 1790s.
Modern glitter, cut from metallised plastic, put the effect within everyone's reach in the 20th century, and brought associations of craft, costume, nightlife and camp. Andy Warhol scattered diamond dust over silkscreens around 1980, and later artists have used glitter, sequins and rhinestones to explore glamour, queer identity and popular taste; the New Zealand artist Reuben Paterson, of Māori descent, has made glitter his principal medium. Look for surfaces that change with the angle of view and never quite survive being photographed.
Related artists
More in Visual Qualities
Grid
Highly Detailed
Highly Ornamented
Irregular Curvilinear Forms
Irregular Linear Forms
Layered Images
Linear Forms
Marbleized
Metallic
Mimicking Ruined Materials
Mirrored
Pastel Colors
Patinated and Oxidized
Patterns
Pixelated
Primary Abstraction
Primary Colors
Psychedelic
Radiating Lines
Raw versus Finished
