Le Gallerie dell'Accademia di Venezia
Laura de Santillana - Beyond Matter
Winner - Fondazione di Venezia - Prize
In occasion with The Venice Glass Week at Le Gallerie dell'Accademia di Venezia, the exhibition - Laura de Santillana - Beyond Matter - until November 26 - in collaboration with the De Santillana Foundation Stichting - curated by Rainald Franz and Michele Tavola. The exhibition celebrates one of the most important figures in the international glass scene, the late Laura de Santillana, by placing in dialogue two of her vital bodies of work: sculptures crafted in nearby Murano and artworks made in the artist's later years in the Czech Republic. The daring sculptures presented in the exhibition capture her unparalleled artistic vision, as she consistently ventured beyond traditional material boundaries.
Laura de Santillana - Sleeves - Czech Republic - 2016
Antonio Canova - Creugas - 1796-1801 + Madame Letizia Bonaparte - 1804-1807
"I think in Glass"
Laura de Santillana
Laura de Santillana - 1955 – 2019 - was born in Venice and trained in New York, where she also worked in the Vignelli studio. From 1975 to 1985, she worked for Venini, the family company founded by her grandfather Paolo Venini, designing objects and lamps now collected globally. From 1989 to 1993, she served as the artistic director of EOS. In 1993, she left the design world to dedicate herself solely to art. Her first exhibition was in Seattle, and her works have since gained global prominence. She created artworks between Venice, the USA, and the Czech Republic. Museums like the Victoria and Albert Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Arts, the Museé des Arts Décoratifs, and several esteemed private collections house her works.
Laura de Santillana - Sleeves - 2015-2016
Caterina Tognon Gallery - Exhibition - Laura de Santillana - Sleeves
“It was as if I found myself with painting
tools in hand. As if I had bags full of colors
already inside the works. The first - Flag - sculptures reminded me of canvases due
to their two-dimensionality, but they had such a tangible substance
that they
inevitably became three-dimensional.
I cannot imagine doing anything more
painterly than with glass”.
Laura de Santillana
Color
For de Santillana, color was not just complementary to form; it stood as its own distinct
language, independent and equally expressive. Her interest in color began
at Venini, and it developed into a central
element throughout her career. From 1989
onwards, she embarked on global travels,
immersing herself in non-Western traditions
that enriched her understanding of color
and form. Her extended research on color
is exemplified in the Flags series, of which
Primary Colors is a prominent example. This
artwork, crafted with the intricate incalmo
technique, draws the viewer's attention to
the junctures of color, simultaneously high-lighting and veiling these crossover points
with an opaque finish.
Primary Colors - Murano - 2011
Elements
This stand-alone installation represents the
culmination of the artist’s experimentation
in Bohemia. Between 2013 and 2019, Laura
de Santillana grappled with the challenge
of crafting sculptures that could stand independently. Unable to find a solution during
this intense experimental phase, she devised
unique configurations that eliminated the
need for a traditional base. Partly because of
this, these sculptures exhibit an unusual dynamism as they are mounted on rotating bases
that permit adjustments to each cylinder's
orientation. De Santillana's enduring interest in the symbolism of architectural elements,
particularly columns, can be found in this
seminal sculpture. Viewed in dialogue with
Paolo Veronese's 16th-century masterpiece,
The Feast in the House of Levi, a monumental
painting with distinctive structural symmetry, 7 Elements highlights De Santillana's
desire to craft stable solutions for vertical glass works. Unlike the columns in the
painting behind, De Santillana’s glass pieces
exude life, movement, and a hint of humanity, with vivid colors accentuated by their
arrangement.
Laura de Santillana - 7 Elements - Czech Republic - 2015
Paolo Veronese - The Feast in the House of Levi - 1573
"Hosting Laura de Santillana's work is an extraordinary opportunity, this exhibition is a
realization of our long-held aspiration...maintaining alignment with the museum's ethos and engaging with our
permanent collection. The Gallerie open once again to glass and contemporary art, marking
its significance during Glass Week a time when Venice reminisces about its unparalleled
artistic legacy. Laura's narrative and creations capture this tradition like no other."
Giulio Manieri Elia
Director of the Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia
Michele Tavola, Co-curator,
Giulio Manieri Elia, Director of the Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia,
Miriam Rejas Del Pino Assistant Curator
Leon Diaz de Santillana, President De Santillana Foundation
Laura de Santillana - Liquid Orange Red - Seattle - 2015
Incisions
Laura de Santillana's approach leant towards
abstraction. She aspired to purify form rather
than seek figuration, yet there's an undeniable anthropomorphic presence in her works.
Many sculptures, like those displayed here,
possess body-like features derived from
intentional incisions: a navel observed in Blessure, and a gilded backbone evident in
Untitled. The artist herself anthropomorphizes her works, referring to the top opening of
these sculptures as a “mouth”.
Untitled - Murano - 2006 - Mirra II - Murano - 2005 - Blessure - Murano - 2003
Incisions
Laura de Santillana - Egyptian Partition - Murano - 2013
Francesco Hayez - Rinaldo e Armida - 1813 + Francesco Hayez - Aristide -1812
Flattening
De Santillana’s technique results
in an almost two-dimensional, canvas-like
shape. Trapped within this flat, rectangular
form lies an ethereal presence — possibly
the lingering breath of the maestro — giving
rise to unique patterns and intriguing imperfections. Drawing comparisons to
ancient artifacts, these works were often
referred to as - books - tablets - steles - emphasizing both their physical appearance
and their evocative, timeless nature. Within this flattened rectangular canvas, de Santillana created layers of complexity
through a refined expressive language. This
form, with its aesthetic research, allowed her
to definitively break with industrial design,
marking a point of no return in her creative
process.
Ciel Terrestre - Murano - 2017 - Nox - Murano 2017
(In8.Vo) Lichen - Murano - 2018
Framing
Since her first trip to East and Southeast
Asia in 1989, de Santillana’s artistic research
has been deeply influenced by Eastern
philosophies. During these journeys, she
became captivated by empty frames, photographing and collecting them. These frames
poetically straddle the line between - inside - and - outside - standing as poignant thresholds that both bind and separate spaces. In de Santillana’s sculptures, there lies a
powerful union between the interior - or core - of the artwork and its external frame. No longer content with the mere suggestion of an internal space, de Santillana
introduced materials that would underscore
its presence. Using materials such as metallic nets and gold leaves, she highlights and
sanctifies these interior spaces. Pieces like
Tav. I capture this dynamic perfectly, where
glass, reminiscent of supple flesh, drapes
over and guards a metallic endoskeleton.
These materials not only provide texture and
contrast but also emphasize the ‘inside’ she
wished to accentuate.
Tav. 1 - Murano - 2007 - Untitled - Murano - 2004c. - Kumran (Infant) - Murano - 2005
Exhibition - I Santillana - 2014
The exhibition at the Stanze del Vetro - I Santillana - traced the double trajectory of artists Laura de Santillana and Alessandro Diaz de Santillana, brother and sister who were direct descendants of the legendary Venini dynasty.
Laura de Santillana
Seriality
Initially recognized for her role as a designer in the family’s business - Venini - and as the artistic director at EOS, de Santillana made significantly fewer design objects after Venini was sold in 1985. From the early 1990s, de Santillana would say that she was driven to create objects devoid of function — self-contained sculptures where glass becomes secondary to a profound aesthetic experience. While she distanced herself from design, its principles continued to influence her art, especially the idea of seriality. Upon identifying a desired sculptural form, which she called the - initiator piece - she would methodically explore its many variations. Each piece in the series would build on the previous, and collectively they present a cohesive narrative. Within this hall, visitors will find some of
the artist’s most ambitious works: the Twins
and Triplets. These artworks were produced in
the Czech Republic between 2013 and 2019
using the - slumping - technique.
Triplet - Czech Republic - 2019 - Twin - Czech republic - 2019
Laura de Santillana
Twin - Czech Republic - 2017
"The work of Laura de Santillana, born in Venetian glass, has flown around the world, in Japan, the United States, the Czech Republic and elsewhere: in the exhibition at the Gallerie dell'Accademia , this hieratic path is described with aesthetic and chronological precision”
Fondazione di Venezia Prize
Laura de Santillana - Beyond Matter
Winner - The Venice Glass Week
Fondazione di Venezia - Prize
The third edition of the Fondazione di Venezia Prize was awarded to the De Santillana Foundation Stichting and the Gallerie dell'Accademia for the Laura de Santillana - Beyond Matter - exhibition curated by Rainald Franz and Michele Tavola. Four years after the artist's death, the exhibition presents over thirty works, emblematic of the experimentation of the last years of Laura de Santillana's activity, a leading exponent of the Murano tradition and the art of processing of glass in the world. The jury was composed of Jean Blanchaert - Curator and member of the Scientific Committee - Giovanna Palandri - Director of the Istituto Veneto di Scienze Lettere ed Arti and Paola Marini - President of the Fondazione di Venezia.
Leon Diaz de Santillana, Paola Marina and Giulio Manieri Elia
Laura de Santillana - Related Blogs Posts
Text - Many Thanks
Text was adapted from
Laura de Santillana - Beyond Matter - Pamphlet
Gallerie dell'Accademia di Venezia
The Venice Glass Week - Website
