In his sculptures of 1997 Robert Gschwantner uses a material that shares numerous common features, such as variable aesthetics, spatial relationships and mobility, with his later oil-carpets.
He works with glass bricks that are normally used to produce translucent walls in internal and external contexts. He makes them float and hang in suspension with the aid of flexible connections lending the brittle material of several hundred kilograms a lightness and mobility that suggests solidity freed entirely of load bearing assignments.

My own private Rome - Rome (I), 1997

In the series My own private Rome he excavates them like a treasure from the ground where he once buried his first glass-brick installations in the archaeological Parco di Veio near Rome (1997). The geometry and the radiance of the quadratic sculpture stand out against nature, in contrast to the glass carpet floating on the surface of the water in the Lago di Bracciano (1997). The undulating surface rises and falls with the waves like a jellyfish conveying the impression of something organic. He placed the same square, supported by a metal frame, atop a flight of stone steps in the centre of Rome. The convex glass reflects the architecture, every single element reflects the materiality of the stone walls.