Tony Cragg. The shapes of glass – Exhibition – Venice – Olivetti shop

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

On the occasion of the 60th International Art ExhibitionThe FAI – Italian Environment Fundin collaboration with Berengo Studiopresents the exhibition Tony Cragg. The shapes of glass, in the historical Olivetti store in Piazza San Marco in Venice – Property owned by Assicurazioni Generali, entrusted to the care and management of the FAI since 2011. In harmony with the spaces designed by Carlo Scarpa, from 18 April to 1 September 2024, A selection of glass sculptures from the artist’s personal collection and a work created specifically for this exhibition by Tony Cragg will be on display to the public.

Among the major artists on the international scene, Tony Cragg (Liverpool, 1949) constantly reinvents the language of sculpture by developing complex relationships between matter and form. Since the 1980s, Cragg has expanded the range of materials used, always managing, thanks also to scientific training, to penetrate the essence of each material and make the most of – and often to the limit – every potential: bronze, iron, ceramic, wood and of course, glass.

By Cristina Beltrami And Jean Blanchaert, the exhibition features over twenty glass sculptures that together with a selection of drawings, also owned by the artist, they narrate the many years of experience with this living and complex material, as well as Cragg’s creative process for which the graphic passage precedes each of his creations becoming, by his own admission, a daily exercise.
Attracted of the extraordinary capacity of the designed spaces by Carlo Scarpa to welcome the sculpture and deeply impressed by the visit to Negozio Olivetti, Tony Cragg created a work unpublished,May 1 to the great Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa. Arabesque it is a sculpture in black glass, made up of a group of vases of different sizes, fused together and wrapped in a thick glass cord with an irregular pattern which, thanks to the mastery of master Nicola Causin, evokes a shape that twists on itself itself. A arabesque precisely, whose rhythmic progression recalls the sinuosities of the Moorish style, that is, a decorative and architectural modality that is more typical of the Venetian architectural tradition.

All the sculptures present at the Olivetti Store were made in Murano in blown glass and solid glass, sometimes using the ancient lost wax technique. Cragg approached artistic glass in the 1980s in Holland but it was in Murano that he took on the most complex technical challenges thanks to the age-old expertise of the masters and the consolidated collaboration with the Berengo Studio furnace.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a cataloguepublished by Linea d’Acqua, and created – like the exhibition – thanks to the support of Berengo Studio and which includes a critical intervention by Jean Blanchaert, an insight into the graphics section by Marta Spanevello and finally a long interview with the artist on the topic of the glass created by Cristina Beltrami to further set the exhibition in the Venetian and Scarpa context.
The exhibition will be accompanied by multimedia material downloadable online which details the complexity of the creative process of these sculptures.

Tony Cragg (Liverpool, 1949) trained at the Royal College of Art in London (1973-77) and at the end of the Seventies began to get noticed with some sculptures intended as assemblages of fragments of wood and above all plastic scrap: fame – unstoppable – was consolidated in 1988 with the awarding of the prestigious Turner Price and the awarding of the National Pavilion of Great Britain at the Venice Biennale. The Eighties in fact correspond to the moment in which Cragg expanded the range of materials used by creating 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, works were born which, faithful to his own modus operandi, use 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 defined as “long-established techniques and procedures” held him back in this direction until the discovery of Murano and the furnace by Adriano Berengo who encouraged him in this direction, that is, towards hand-crafted artistic glass.
Tony Cragg was director of the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he taught since 1978. He currently lives and works in Wuppertal where he created a public sculpture park that hosts the major names in international plastics.