Friday, January 14, 2022

Murano - Museo del Vetro - Tony Cragg - Silicon Dioxide

 Museo del Vetro di Murano  
Tony Cragg - Silicon Dioxide 
 
At the Museo del Vetro di Murano the new solo exhibition - Tony Cragg - Silicon Dioxide is curated by Adriano Berengo, Berengo Studio in collaboration with the Musei Civici di Venezia and runs through March 13. A selection of about forty sculptures are on display, they faithfully reproduces Cragg's artistic vision and his unique ability to communicate through glass, a material of which he has always been able to enhance the intrinsic geometries. The exhibition traces  the most significant stages of the English artist's career, starting with the assemblages, historical large-scale works where small groups of objects are juxtaposed and superimposed. It is from this point, as early as the 1980s with his large-scale sculptural assemblages, that Cragg began to define his artistic output through his interest in the material itself. Cragg continually tests himself with his use of different materials, and glass is certainly one of the most fascinating and complex materials to manipulate and decipher.
 
Tony Cragg - Bromide Figures - 1992

https://www.berengo.com/news/tony-cragg-silicon-dioxide-open-in-museo-del-vetro-murano//

 


 
The British sculptor Tony Cragg was born in Liverpool in 1949, and first came to Venice in 1980. Little did he realise it would be the first in a series of encounters with the Serenissima. As his career progressed he featured in a number of editions of La Biennale di Venezia and in 1988 had the double honour of winning the prestigious Turner Prize as well as representing Great Britain at the Venice Biennale in the giardini.
Sir Tony Cragg CBE RA 
 

 
 
Glass is itself a crucible in which particles blend, are broken, 
and reassemble, where the free potential of organic 
matter manages to transform itself and go beyond its 
own limits to shift into a new material state. 
 
The artist's oeuvre is saturated in his essential ontological exploration of matter, and his desire to investigate the relationships that regulate the dynamic energy of materials results in works that manage to balance the interior and exterior energies of the forms he creates. Cragg's works, even his most recent creations, reflect on the complexity of physics, reconciling a total understanding of the organic nature of reality with an acceptance of its less intelligible characteristics. 
Tony Cragg - Untitled - 2021 
 

Cragg's creations are constant paradoxes of 'shapeless forms', in which each work of art is a pure mental evocation. While his experiments in bronze, wood and plaster seem to escape gravity, his glass sculptures, conceived in living matter, challenge the brilliance and transparency of this expressive medium ".
Adriano Berengo
President - Berengo Studio
Exhibition curator 
 
Maurizio Musatti, Jean Blanchaert and Adriano Berengo
 
 
Tony Cragg - Blood Sugar - 1992
 

Glass is a material and at the same time a living matter, which over the years has lent itself to various experiments, ranging from those in which it interacts in a way that is never inferior to its surroundings, to those in which it is the protagonist of more intimate reflections. Using this perspective, the sculptures that Cragg began to produce in 2009, when he began working with Berengo Studio in Murano, are particularly important. In a striking evolution from the larger assemblages of the 1990s, the smaller hand-blown sculptures in glass, created with the master glass maestros of Berengo Studio, have allowed Cragg to access a new dimension of the material. 

Tony Cragg - Untitled - 2021 

 



Tony Cragg - Untitled - 2021

 


Chiara Squarcina and Jean Blanchaert

 

 

Tony Cragg - Untitled - 2021

 

 

Tony Cragg - Untitled - 2021

 

 

Tony Cragg - Cistern - 1999

 

 

Tony Cragg - Eroded Landscape - 1988-2021

 


Zbyszek Gula

 

 
Tony Cragg - Larder
- 1999

 

 

No longer bound to the traditional found forms of bottles and other classical objects, in his more recent works Cragg has been able to explore the possibilities of manipulating the medium in its molten state. This flexibility has seen him choreograph elaborate and original compositions in the Berengo furnace, which have emerged organically, sprouting from his mind and slipping through the hands of the maestro into a new physical presence, one that resists the stasis of sculpture and reaches instead to capture the movement and energy of single moment. 

 
Maestro Glassblowers 
Nicola Causin and Roberto Mavaracchio

 

 

Mario Berengo

 
 
Related Post
Venice Biennale Collateral Event – Glasstress 2015 Gotika Exhibition

 

 

 






 




 
 
 
 

 

 


 
 
 

 


 

 

Pin It