https://www.theveniceglassweek.com/en/
THE VENICE GLASS WEEK is the international festival that the city of Venice dedicates to the art of glass. The fourth edition, #TheHeartOfGlass, will take place from 5th to 13th September 2020. With a programme of exhibitions, demonstrations, guided tours, online events and more, this year’s festival will place a special focus on the “making” of glass: the artistic and productive activity which has been deeply embedded in the Lagoon City’s DNA for over a thousand years, and for which Murano continues to be renowned and celebrated around the world.
The overlaying technique is an ancient technique, still widely in use today, obtained by submerging the blown artefact in a crucible with glass of different colour. Cased glass was the mainstay of Venini’s production with Tomaso Buzzi. He was very fond of this technique and explored it with great passion and commitment, and often turned to Venini’s glassblowers for advice. Buzzi devised a new texture consisting of five to seven ultra-thin coloured glass layers enclosing one or two layers of very thin lattimo glass. The new glass material was then decorated with gold leaf. The final result had a previously unseen play of color and a rich and fascinating appearance.
Buzzi’s glass was often pink, green-yellow or grey-blue. These colors characterized the laguna, alga and alba series, while the tramonto items had pinkish-red hues.
GLOSSARY
Here you can find more information about the glassmaking techniques, so that you can easily recognise them in the works on show in the exhibition!
Mosaic glass: made with fragments of glass (tesserae and/or rod sections) of different colours placed side by side and fused together, it has been in use since the 19th century.
Among the most evocative artefacts designed by Bianconi for Venini are those featuring glass tesserae. A first example of pezzato (patchwork) glass, where the tesserae themselves form the wall of the piece, was exhibited at the 25th Venice Biennale, in 1950. To produce these pezzati, the tesserae, obtained from a cane flattened into a tape and cold-cut, were arranged in a mosaic pattern on a fire stone. Once in the oven, the effect of the heat welded the tesserae together, forming a glass pattern, which was then enclosed in a cylinder to be blown and hot-modelled into the designed form. For the pezzati Bianconi generally opted for unusual forms with flattened cross-sections, which were particularly irregular and were characterised by soft lines, sometimes interrupted by constrictions and protrusions. Most of the pieces in the series are in transparent glass, but there are also examples with opaque tesserae made out of canes with a lattimo nucleus.
Fulvio Bianconi, Vases in Pezzato glass with opaque tessere, 1950-51. Photo: Enrico Fiorese
I start with videos about my collection. Here you see part I. If you have any questions or if you need a price, don't hesitate to contact me:
Born in Turin, in 1929, Riccardo Licata studied in Venice. Painter, tile setter, sculptor, carver, ceramist, scenographist, he explores and masters many techniques. He taught in prestigious universities in France and Italy. With sixty years of experience, he has shown work in four hundred personal exhibitions and along with other artists in more than five hundred collective exhibitions worldwide. He has received several prizes and awards such as Chevalier of the Order of Arts in France and Italy.
I have discovered the Christmas story by Riccardo Licata long ago by luck. The heirs of a deceased lawyer from Rome could not do much with this kind of art and through a friend I was able to buy this very unique and rare masterpieces. There are 8 glass blocks in which the Christmas story illustrated: Jesus, Mary and Joseph, the three kings , the ox and the donkey. This work is extremely demanding and could never be produced by other glass artists in this quality. It can be assumed that it is the first major work of glass art by Riccardo Licata. Each piece has an engraved by hand signature and the year 1952. At the same time his first Biennale and Single-exhibition was held in Venice where he showed glass blocks with underwater worlds. The same glass technique he employed in the coming years for its famous glass blocks-aquariums and fantasy objects that he created together with Gino Cenedese and Alfredo Barbini. For Venini he has created some Murrinenvasen and bowls, this with a continuous Murrinenband in "doppio incalmo" - something in the glass art is the most demanding at all possible.