On display until 24 November 2024 at the Negozio Olivetti in Piazza San Marco in Venice is the exhibition ‘Tony Cragg. The shapes of glass’, curated by Cristina Beltrami and Jean Blanchaert.

“If you try to imagine a world without glass, you realise what an enormous loss it would be, both in practical and aesthetic terms.” Tony Cragg, 2021

On the occasion of the 60th International Art Exhibition, FAI, in collaboration with Fondazione Berengo, presents the exhibition Tony Cragg. Le forme del vetro*, in the historic Negozio Olivetti in Piazza San Marco in Venice – a property owned by Assicurazioni Generali, entrusted to FAI since 2011 to the care and management of FAI.

In keeping with the spaces designed by Carlo Scarpa, a selection of glass sculptures from the artist’s personal collection and a work created from scratch in close dialogue with the Scarpa spaces will be on public display from 18 April to 1 September 2024.

One of the leading artists on the international scene, Tony Cragg (Liverpool, 1949) constantly reinvents the language of sculpture by developing complex relationships between material and form. Since the 1980s, Cragg has expanded the range of materials he uses, always managing, perhaps also thanks to his scientific training, to penetrate the essence of each material and exploiting its full—and often limitless—potential: bronze, iron, ceramics, wood and of course, glass.

The exhibition

Curated by Cristina Beltrami and Jean Blanchaert, the exhibition presents more than twenty glass sculptures that together with a selection of drawings, also owned by the artist, narrate Cragg’s many years of experience with this living and complex material, as well as his creative process for which the graphic passage precedes each of his creations, becoming, by his own admission, a daily exercise.

Having always been attracted to the work of Carlo Scarpa and the extraordinary capacity of the spaces he designed to accommodate sculpture, and profoundly impressed by his visit to Negozio Olivetti, Tony Cragg has created an unprecedented sculpture that pays homage to the great Venetian architect and his work.

All the sculptures in the Negozio Olivetti were made in Murano, in blown glass and solid glass, with a few forays using the lost wax technique, or blown entirely by hand.

Cragg approached art glass in the 1990s in Holland, but it was in Murano that he took up the most complex technical challenges, thanks to the age-old technical expertise of the masters, and the well-established collaboration with the Fondazione Berengo’s furnace.

The catalogue

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, published by Linea d’Acqua, and realised – like the exhibition – thanks to the support of Berengo Studio, with a critical intervention by Jean Blanchaert, a text by Cristina Beltrami that traces the artist’s ties with the Venetian and Scarpian context, and a focus on the graphics section by Marta Spanevello.
The exhibition is accompanied by downloadable online multimedia materialdetailing the complexity of the creative process of these sculptures.

The artist

Tony Cragg (Liverpool, 1949) trained at the Royal College of Art in London (1973-77) and at the end of the 1970s began to make a name for himself with a number of sculptures intended as assemblages of fragments of wood and above all scraps of plastic: his fame – unstoppable – was consolidated in 1988 when he was awarded the prestigious Turner Price and was assigned the British National Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. The 1980s marked the period when Cragg expanded his range of materialshe used by making sculptures in bronze, iron, ceramic or glass. A material he approached in 1986, when Willem Heesen invited him to a symposium in Leerdam: from that meeting came works that, true to his own modus operandi, employed industrial glass modified through satin-finishing, waxes and the use of chemical materials such as bromide. It was also in Holland that he had the opportunity to experiment with blown glass – with the Czech master Petr Novotny – but what he himself called “long-established techniques and procedures” held him back in this direction until he discovered Murano, and Adriano Berengo’s furnace, which encouraged him in this direction, i.e. towards hand-made art glass.

Currently Tony Cragg is the director of the Kunst Akademie in Düsseldorf, where he has been teaching since 1978. He lives and works in Wuppertal where he has created a public sculpture park that hosts major international plastic artists.

*article in Italian