A comprehensive article by arts journalist Rachel Spence about trends in modern glass affecting it's birthplace. She has many great articles over at Financial Times.
2009 Rachel Spence:
"If the island of Murano wants to survive, it must turn its back on drinking glasses and embrace the vogue for contemporary sculpture in glass. Since the first workshops lit their furnaces nearly a millennium ago, the island of Murano in the Venetian lagoon has been synonymous with the finest glassware in the world. As aesthetic styles evolved over the centuries, the glassmasters kept pace. Their wafer-thin Renaissance goblets, baroque chandeliers and modernist vessels were in demand across the world.
Recently, however, the island’s fortunes have plummeted. A tide of cheap glassware from Asia has torn into profits. The pre-eminence of Murano’s masters has been challenged by glassmakers from elsewhere, such as the late Czech sculptor Stanislav Libensky, and Dale Chihuly, the Seattle-based figurehead of the American “studio glass” movement whose other stars include William Morris and Toots Zynsky. Although Chihuly learnt much of his craft on Murano, the island’s own furnaces have been slow to innovate.
The latest recession has swept the industry close to the abyss. Sales have dropped by an average of 40 per cent. According to FILCEM-CGIL, the union that represents the artisans, more than half of its 900 workers are on government-subsidised home leave. A further 100 have been laid off entirely.
Yet visitors to the Venice Biennale this autumn could be forgiven for thinking that Murano has never been in better shape. A clutch of exhibitions has been devoted to glass with many new works realised on the island.
Historically, the most significant show is in the Venice Pavilion in the biennale gardens. Built in 1934 to showcase local decorative arts such as glass, ceramics and lace, the pavilion was abandoned in the 1970s and only re-opened in 2007. This year it is showcasing artists who work on Murano.
Ferruccio Franzoia, the show’s curator, says: “The Veneto region [which owns the pavilion] wanted to show that there is still extraordinary creativity on Murano and remind people of Venice’s history as a crucible of decorative arts.”
Yet to describe many of these works as decorative is a misrepresentation. The austere slabs of Laura de Santillana, their opaque surfaces disturbed by iridescent ripples, have the quality of ancient archetypes. The organic forms of Cristiano Bianchin, their impenetrable surfaces sheathed in woven fabric, are charged with mute, expressive potency. Long fascinated by marine biology and astrophysics, Maria Grazia Rosin has created a multimedia installation where trailing LED-lit threads sway like jellyfish to a moody techno soundtrack above a video projection of a black hole swirling with mercurial liquids. Surely these works possess the metaphysical power of fine art?
“The distinction between decorative arts and fine arts is becoming increasingly artificial,” agrees Franzoia. “These artists use glass as other artists use bronze, marble or wood.”
Rosin, who studied painting at the Fine Arts Academy in Venice, says: “I started using glass after I became interested in the idea of three-dimensional colour on canvas. You could paint in marble but it’s not the same thing at all.”
Rosin’s gallerist in Venice, Caterina Tognon, was one of the first to specialise in glass as fine art. “I could see there was little future in artisanal production,” says Tognon, who opened her first gallery in Bergamo in 1994. “At first, it wasn’t easy but now art critics are opening their horizons.”
Rosin has recently enjoyed a run of solo museum shows, in Venice, Pittsburgh and, next month, in Seattle. Another of Tognon’s regular artists, the late Stanislav Libensky, broke auction records for glass when one of his sculptures sold for $400,000 at Bonhams in 2007. Meanwhile, a recent show by Toots Zynsky, whose exquisite glass-cane sculptures appear to have been carved from spun sugar, was a sell-out: “We sold everything and had to ask her to produce more,” Tognon says.
Tognon has gone a step further with her current exhibition. She invited two artists who have never worked in glass before, Venice-based painter Maria Morganti and Roman installation artist Bruna Esposito, to realise their new pieces on Murano.
By layering small squares of clear and coloured glass with gold and silver leaf, Morganti has created a vast, glowing checkerboard that pulsates with visceral, painterly power. Esposito has created an installation that uses different materials – tiny balls of straw, clear glass cylinders enclosed by metal propellers – to conjure a poetic lagoon landscape. In subordinating the material to just one aspect of an ensemble piece, these works signal a new approach to glass.
A similar vision animates Glass Stress, an exhibition of 45 artists at Palazzo Franchetti. Here, glass is cast into replicas of car tyres by Robert Rauschenberg, blown into amethyst-hued pigeons and their droppings by Jan Fabre, washed with acid in Kiki Smith’s constellation of black eggs, and carved into a table complete with witty, incised place settings by Silvano Rubino. The material proves itself as versatile as the vision of each artist.
Many of the newer pieces in Glass Stress were made in the Murano furnace of Adriano Berengo, the show’s organiser. “I am interested in offering artists the possibility of using glass when they want to in the service of their art,” says the Venice-born entrepreneur.
After a slow start – “the art world was sceptical about glass and the glass world did not approve at all” – Berengo’s business is one of the very few on the island to flourish. He has four showrooms in Venice, more than 6,000 collectors, and relationships with 150 artists.
If Murano is to survive, more furnaces must build relationships with contemporary artists from across the spectrum. Meanwhile glass art is extending its appeal beyond Venice. Earlier this year, Bonhams dedicated its first sale to modern and contemporary glass.
Last year, Berlin saw the city’s first gallery dedicated to the genre open in the heart of its contemporary art scene. Owned by Nadania Idriss, whose passion for glass was sparked when she studied in Seattle, the current show features one of Berengo’s artists, the Lebanese-Canadian Marya Kazoun. Looking at Kazoun’s spectacularly ethereal installation in Glass Stress, it’s easy to see why Idriss is feeling confident."
Spence, R. "Glass conciousness." October 9, 2009. Financial Times. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/ffa13f62-b3c9-11de-98ec-00144feab49a.html
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