Josiah McElheny, exhibition review: Lose yourself in a crystalline world

Josiah McElheny spent years apprenticed to master glassblowers in Europe and the US but marries his skills to references — oblique or obvious — to science, literature and the history of art. His works are as likely to make you gasp as ponderously stroke your chin.

Amid disparate works from the last decade, there’s a welcome return for an installation that is pure McElheny, first shown in London in 2008, Island Universe. He riffs here on Hans Harald Rath’s “sputnik” chandeliers gracing the Metropolitan Opera in New York. But where Rath’s designs merely evoked the cosmological wonder of the space age, McElheny’s hanging sculptures marry these modernist icons to precise science, each one evoking a theory about the big bang, a universe in glass and aluminium.

A part-fact, part-fiction film shown in a cinema punctuated by coloured glass bricks focuses on Vizcaya, an early 20th-century, Renaissance-inspired villa in Miami. It’s a slow-burning cinematic poem to glass, light and sensuality.

More instant and dramatic are McElheny’s exquisite yet queasy latest works, drawing on Robert Smithson’s fractured, mirrored paintings. McElheny has made relief sculptures inspired by Smithson’s works and filled them with a crystalline world, with abstract glass forms reflected endlessly in mirrors. They have a sci-fi trippiness to them, futuristic yet lacily gothic. I was rapt: you can easily lose yourself in their play of reflection and solidity, hard edge and sensuous curve.

Until April 13 (020 7930 5373, whitecube.com)