Shattering Stereotypes

November 2009 Datebook

Bucking Convention

Miles of Aisles

My Brilliant Career: Lynda Benglis

Movers & Shakers

Remembrance of Things Past

Christopher Brown

Unfamiliar Territory

Conversation With RoseLee Goldberg

A Man of Many Stripes

Rock Solid

Secret Stash

Good Times

Elevating Iron

In the Air

Also This Month

Mark Rothko Yoichi Ohira Laura de Santillana Warhols Send Sotheby’s Soaring From Raging Bulls to Miserable Drips New York Sales Preview Rothko Returns to Russia Obamas Bring Bold Art to the White House

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NEW YORK—Glass gets no respect in the contemporary-art world. It doesn’t matter how acclaimed the artists who create in the medium are or how revelatory their expressions. With but a few exceptions, glass art is dismissed as "decorative." Lately, though, there have been signs of a shift in attitude. Bonhams held its first auction of modern and contemporary "glass sculpture" last May in London and has scheduled another one for next fall. And after an absence of more than 30 years from the Venice Biennale, despite its historic links with the city, glass art is the subject of two important shows at the 2009 edition: "Glasstress" and "Fa come nature face in foco" ("Do as nature does in the flame").

Three of the artists featured in the latter show — Cristiano Bianchin, Yoichi Ohira and Laura de Santillana, who are among the boldest innovators in the medium — are also the subjects of the 10-year retrospective "Venice. 3 Visions in Glass," organized by the Barry Friedman gallery, in New York. The show, which runs through January 16, 2010, comprises more than 100 new pieces and 100 retrospective works. Over the next two years, it will travel to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, in Kansas City, the Naples Museum of Art in Florida, and the Museé des Arts décoratifs in Paris, no doubt challenging preconceptions about glass art at each of these venues.

All three artists create on Murano, in collaboration with glassmakers immersed in the island’s age-old techniques, and live in Venice, which influences them in ways as unpredictable as molten glass. A nostalgia for his childhood in "this city frozen in time" has led Bianchin to make pieces concerned with notions of death in life, eternity and lost worlds. He has resurrected out-of-fashion techniques, like engraved black glass, and forgotten materials, like braided hemp.

A native of Japan, Ohira has gained fame through his experiments with various glass powders to confect vessels of intricate complexity in rich Venetian hues. Although he has taken up the palette of his adopted island, it is the ancient vessel culture of the Far East that most inspires his art. His most recent and radical work, Cristallo Sommerso, is a series of cased-blown glass pieces that appear to be carved from the inside out and that at once evoke the human figure and a raindrop falling into a pool of water.

The granddaughter of Paolo Venini, de Santillana might be described as Murano royalty. After more than a decade serving as a designer at a variety of distinguished glassworks, including that of her family, she set off to create her own art. Her glass vessels, slabs and, most recently, convoluted ovoids fluently meld elements of sculpture and painting. Indeed what drives much of her art-making is her exploration of the threshold — what the Japanese call engawa. Take her slabs of glowing color, often likened to the canvases of Mark Rothko. The slight flat space that remains when the blowers collapse the glass vessel captures ambient illumination and enables de Santillana to exceed the painter’s color effects. The capacity for refracting light is but one of the characteristics of this medium that make it such a compelling material for artists — and for the collectors of their work.

"Shattering Stereotypes" originally appeared in the November 2009 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's November 2009 Table of Contents.