“Pianist’s Dress Impression”, 2005, cast glass, cold-worked

This ghostly glass sculpture by Karen LaMonte is part of Palm Springs Art Museum‘s exhibition Meditations in Glass, on view until 11/23/25.

From the museum about the work-

This life-size figure of a pianist projects a ghostly aura, yet the sculpture holds light in its mass like the spirit is held in the physical body. We can see how flesh once filled out the figure, noting how the buttons of the dress strain over the chest. Glass is “air, ethereal, material/non-material, ungraspable, fleeting, spiritual,” says LaMonte. “The absent figure is important to me because it tempers the undemanding pleasure of beauty with insinuations of loss and mortality.”