Kent Rasmussen's Pipe Work

October 8, 2015 by Sykes Wilford in Makers and Artists

I first met Kent Rasmussen in 2003. At the time, he'd been making pipes for a few years and had developed a highly distinctive, structured style, bringing an architectural eye to the medium. Kent had a background as a trained sculptor and architect and had worked as a sculptor before discovering pipes in the late 1990s. Living in Aarhus, on Jutland, he met Teddy Knudsen, who continues to deeply influence his style. Yet Kent's work was almost immediately distinctive. Less playful than Teddy's work, Kent's pipes have a solidity and formality in their grace that is evocative of post-war modernist architecture, but instead of leaning on the aesthetic ideas of Danish functionalists, Kent draws more widely, working with forms that are reminiscent of a variety of artists and architects, ranging from Frank Lloyd Wright to I M Pei.

Over the past few years, Kent's work has become more sculptural. He continued to push the boundaries in terms of size and complexity, creating pipes that were primarily works of sculpture. Recently though, he seems to have tacked back towards more conventional forms. Of course, the work presented in this update is still highly distinctive, with the sort of brilliance of form that we've come to expect from Kent. Yet it possesses a renewed practicality: the pipes, while not small, are a little smaller and the shapes are more structured around their "pipe-ness" and less around complexity or intricacy of form.

Kent's style is so distinctive as to be immediately recognizable across a large room — a large smoky, dimly lit room at that. These pieces are still very much within that oeuvre. Yet with these — including our first sandblasted pipes from Kent in more than four years — Kent has decided to make sculptural pipes rather than sculptures that happen to be pipes. It is very much a matter of emphasis rather than departure, a return to an approach that was more typical for him a decade ago, but with a sophistication of aesthetics and construction that comes with ten years of maturity as an artist and craftsman.

While I cannot help but be wowed with Kent's most complex, sculptural work, it is his work like this — more practical, a little smaller, less formalized — that really speaks to me. I am impressed by his bigger sculptural work, but I love his simpler, yet still distinctive, "pipe" work.