For the 100th anniversary of the birth of Ettore Sottsass (1917 - 2007), LE STANZE DEL VETRO will celebrate his glass production with the exhibition Ettore Sottsass: The Glass, curated by Luca Massimo Barbero, Director of the Institute of Art History of Fondazione Giorgio Cini. The exhibition will run on the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice from 10th April to 30th July 2017, featuring more than 200 works, many of which on show for the first time, with an innovative exhibition set-up design by Annabelle Selldorf Studio. It will be the first exhibition ever entirely dedicated to the glass and crystal production of the Italian designer. The exhibition will be accompanied by the first Catalogue raisonné of the complete glass production by Sottsass, published by Skira.
"Glass is an incredible medium, very mysterious, transparent and fragile at the same time" - Sottsass stated on occasion of one of his last public appearances. - "Glass, as well as ceramics, has a very peculiar trait: one does not really know what it is that goes into the furnace. Then all of a sudden a pure object breaks out, burnt by fire, an object of sheer purity, and physical intangibility. It is like a vision. One is deeply involved when making glass. Glass is spectacular."
"Sottsass’s glass works are complex bodies, designed as human characters." - explains Luca Massimo Barbero, the curator of the exhibition - "The artist-architect breaks through the technical boundaries of the objects using materials such as glass, plastic and Corian and brings them to life. They are compound materials in some ways similar to glass, a pure and mysterious medium, which stems from an alchemy between natural elements transformed by fire. Ettore Sottsass: The Glass is an exhibition that brings Murano glass into the present with a vitality that projects it into the future."
To exemplify the strength, the curiosity and the creative originality of Sottsass’s experimentation with glass, one of the galleries of the exhibition will be dedicated to an innovative series of sculptures, designed by Sottsass in 1999 at the request of the Sheik of Qatar, Saud Al Thani, for his "Millenium House": 21 glass sculptures, of different dimensions, some over a meter tall, produced at the Cenedese glassworks in Murano, on display for the first time.
The exhibition will also feature works produced in collaboration with the research center Cirva in Marseille, where as of 2004 Sottsass designed the Kachinas series, inspired by the Pueblo votive dolls by the same name.
