Galleria Abscondita inaugurates on Friday 20th September 2024 the exhibition Forme Pure. Murano 1921-40, a curated show on the golden age of glass in the last century, with works made by the major glass manufacturers and designed by the most important artists.
The process of creating a glass object is an alchemical work. In the furnace of the night the elements are melted, mixed and finally purified by fire. At dawn, the molten glass is removed from the crucible, blown and shaped by the hands of the master. When the sun is high, the artefacts are already in the muffle to temper.
In the process, the work is always made according to a model, a paradigmatic form, imagined, drawn and represented: through labour, it becomes real. The glass master and the designer are the two faces – one factual, the other ideational – of a single demiurgic activity.
Of the ancient Murano glassworks, traces remain in museums or private collections. Those objects tell us the story of a living, breathing community whose protagonists we barely or no longer remember. But their legacy is now part of our tradition: they are classics glassworks!
This same activity, organic and collective, gave birth to the major Murano factories of the early 20th century. Their models, whose authorship we have rediscovered thanks to recent studies, are distinguished by the artists’ research into the purity of form – understood above all as the abandonment of ornamentation.
While waiting for the exhibited objects to become classics themselves, we bear witness with this exhibition to the work of the major personalities and manufacturers of that revolution in Murano blown glass, which later characterized the “Novecento” aesthetics. The delicate Secessionist-Renaissance soul of Vittorio Zecchin, the rigorous and monumental aesthetics of Napoleone Martinuzzi, the material and formal experimentation of Carlo Scarpa – the first three artistic directors of Venini. Alongside them, we include a ceiling light by Tomaso Buzzi, a work by Ercole Barovier for Barovier & Toso and one by Fratelli Toso.
The exhibition is also an appendix to the most recent researches presented in this field, a trace of memory of objects that cannot be omitted or forgotten by academic or institutional studies, but that exist and travel thanks to the rules of the market.
