At times one location is not enough to contain one exhibition and, if you're lucky and have the funds and the locations available, you can expand into more than one venue and come up with a more complex and rich vision. This is what will happen next week when the event "A Furnace in Marseille. Cirva" (opening on 9th April) will launch in two Venice-based locations – Le Stanze del Vetro (on the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore; closing on 29th June) and the Fondazione Querini Stampalia (Santa Maria Formosa, Castello 5252; closing on 24th June).
Curated by Isabelle Reiher, Director of the Cirva, and Chiara Bertola, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Querini Stampalia, this Spring exhibition is dedicated to Marseille's Centre international de recherche sur le verre et les arts plastiques (Cirva) and will feature a selection of the most significant works from its collection, including pieces by artists and designers who have been in residence at the Cirva over the last thirty years.
Designed as a research laboratory, the Cirva was established in Marseille in 1986 as a non-for-profit state entity to host international artists, designers and architects wishing to introduce glass to their creative process.
The resident artists are often confronted with a difficult-to-master material for the first time in their careers, but always manage to develop unique designs assisted by the Cirva technical team.
Over thirty years, Cirva has hosted around 200 artists for various projects in the fields of contemporary art, design and decorative arts. It also owns a collection of 700 works exhibited in museums and art centers all over the world.
"A Furnace in Marseille" hopes to introduce visitors to the creative process behind the pieces selected: the contemporary artists involved actually came into contact with the glass world throughout their careers only occasionally and this means that they reinterpret glass in new ways and that the pieces on display are characterised by unexpected, unusual and surprising shapes, forms, structures and colours.
The galleries at Le Stanze del Vetro will focus on the researches that went into the pieces of ten artists – Larry Bell, Pierre Charpin, Lieven De Boeck, Erik Dietman, Tom Kovachevich, Giuseppe Penone, Jana Sterbak, Martin Szekely, Robert Wilson and Terry Winters.
Here it will be possible to admire De Boeck's glass mikado and Lego-like bulding blocks in their transparent colourful splendour; Kovachevich's super fragile thin modernist sculptures and Salvadori's piece, inspired by gravity and playing with the ideas of reflection and refraction.
The contemporary spaces on the third floor of the Fondazione Querini Stampalia, will feature instead the work of eight artists – Dove Allouche, James Lee Byars, Giuseppe Caccavale, Hreinn Fridfinnsson, Philippe Parreno, Remo Salvadori, Jana Sterbak and Francisco Tropa (Caccavale and Salvadori also created new works for Cirva that will be part of this display at the Querini Stampalia) – and will focus on how an idea becomes a form and a shape at Marseille's Cirva.
Among the highlights in this section there are Caccavale's vases covered with extracts from "Journey to Armenia" by Osip Mandelstam; Parreno's desk lamp transformed into a functional yet impractically fragile (but absolutely desirable) transparent ghost and Byars' red glass spheres forming on the floor of one of the rooms an abstract figure calling to mind an angel. Through these pieces and installations glass becomes a medium to translate an idea into something real and tangible.
The duality of the exhibition is not only represented by the two venues, by the two cities involved – Venice and Marseille, both lapped by water and both interested in giving a new modern life to glass – but also by the binary codes adopted by the artists and designers who often played with the hard Vs fragile, lights Vs shadows, glossy Vs matte and transparent Vs solid dichotomies to create their works.
Image credits for this post
1. Lieven De Boeck, Mikado LBD Modulor (detail), installation view, ph. Enrico Fiorese
2. Lieven De Boeck, Sã (100 Legos) (detail), installation view, ph. Enrico Fiorese
3. Thomas Kovachevich, Characters, Portrait of This Room (green), installation view, ph. Enrico Fiorese
4. Atelier du Cirva, © 2017, ph. David Giancatarina
5. Remo Salvadori, Gravità 0°, installation view, ph. Enrico Fiorese
6. Terry Winters, Marseille Template #12, installation view, ph. Enrico Fiorese
7. Giuseppe Caccavale, Armenia – Istituto di traduzione, installation view, ph. Enrico Fiorese
8. Philippe Parreno, Lampe de bureau, installation view, ph. Enrico Fiorese
9. Martin Szekely, Plats, installation view, ph. Enrico Fiorese
10. James Lee Byars, Le Petit Ange rouge (detail), installation view, ph. Enrico Fiorese
11. Jana Sterbak, Hard Entry, installation view, ph. Enrico Fiorese
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