Venetian artist’s debut China show to run until March
Lino Tagliapietra’s ongoing solo exhibition in China started in late August.
With that opening, the 84-year-old Venetian glass artist made his debut in the country.
The exhibition, Lino Tagliapietra: One of a Kind, which runs through March, is showcasing nearly 50 large pieces of art in glass spanning almost 20 years of his career, says Chang Yi, curator of the show and founder of Liuli China Museum where it is being held.
“Tagliapietra is a master of the craft whose influence on American studio glass permanently changed the landscape of contemporary glass art.”
Studio glass is the term used to describe artworks that are produced after glass is given 3-D and other effects.
Venice has had a long history of creating art in the material that Tagliapietra calls “wonderful”.
“Because it is alive … it is moving even when it is cool. It’s connected with fire and water … created by humans and (it is) so natural at the same time,” the artist says. “Glass is everything to me. Glass is my life.”
Venetian glassware is a highly skilled craft, Chang says.
“Most Venetian glassmakers we know work exclusively in blowing glass and start learning it in their youth.”
Tagliapietra was born on the Venetian island of Murano, the heart of glass business for centuries. He dropped out of school to apprentice under master artisan Archimede Seguso in 1946, when he was 12 years old. From fetching water and mopping floors, Tagliapietra worked his way up and by 25 he had himself earned the position of maestro and went on to design for internationally recognized studios.
Tagliapietra began to design and create for himself by the 1960s. He worked as the artistic and technical director for Effetre International, an important glass factory in Venice, from 1976 to 1989.
In 1979, he traveled to the United States when invited by fellow artist Dale Chihuly and taught in Seattle, where he shared the secrets of Venetian glass techniques with eager students. But back in Venice, some fellow glassmakers condemned him for revealing too much, believing the traditional techniques belong to Venice.
To this Tagliapietra says: “All that we learn comes from someone or somewhere. Knowledge doesn’t belong to any one person or entity. No one brought technical knowhow to Murano. It was developed as glassmakers worked together and pushed each other to try new and different things.”
He went on to initiate exchanges of knowledge between Italian and US glass artists.
As an artist, Tagliapietra is recognized for the “particular Venetian sensibility to glass”, Rosa Barovier Mentasti, a historian of glassmaking, comments in his book Lino Tagliapietra: From Murano to Studio Glass Works 1954-2011.
In Tagliapietra’s works, the design and technical implementation are so closely intertwined that the historian says: “He thinks in glass, that is, he conceives the work not only in terms of its aesthetic qualities but simultaneously in the methods of its production.”
Tagliapietra’s creations have been featured in prominent museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the De Young in San Francisco.
The Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti organized a major retrospective of Tagliapietra’s work in 2011.
The prestigious platform came from another created by Napoleon for the Kingdom of Italy in 1810.