EXHIBITION: “Chihuly’s Venetians” on view at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma

On view through January 4, 2016, the "Chihuly's Venetians" exhibition at The Museum of Glass focuses on a recreation of Venetian Art Deco glass, an elaborate reimagining of the era's peculiar aesthetics and forms. To realize this series which ran from 1989 to 1997, Chihuly collaborated with Pino Signoretto and Lino Tagliapietra. Chihuly was inspired by an affecting encounter with original 1920s-30s pieces in Venice in 1999, and the artist worked with the two masters to yield intensely colorful and subversive glass pieces, classical Italian forms with a vibrant twist. 

With mythical figures like Putti and Cherubs, traditional imageries are replicated on vessels rendered in startling hues: red tendrils and chartreuse leaves, green spotted vases and mystic blue swans. Venini glass, under art director Napoleone Martinuzzi in 1925-1931, exhibited this pattern in style during the Art Deco period which Chihuly's work takes inspiration from. Credited for reviving Murano glass in the twentieth century, Martinuzzzi designed symmetrical structures in jade green, red and electric blue, reinventing historical forms in intensely hued palettes. Fauna and flora motifs are severely elegant rather than organic and submissively decorative. Botanical parts that protrude out of vases, give off an exotic quality. The statuesque features drew attention to the nature-driven imageries as creative subjects more so than well-crafted objects, once characteristics that served as embellishment in fine craftsmanship. The innovative format demonstrated a more artistic narrative -- cacti plants are depicted as a swarm of tentacles, or a solid cerulean blue presence with an iridescent sheen. Horses and elephants are sleek and Machine Age-inspired design, shaped in a way that stands independently. It was this that Chihuly observed, and triggered his exploration to temper with traditional and iconic details.

 

"Chihuly's Venetians," by comparison, stirs instant recognition of the artist's signature design with colors -- active and sprawling, flamboyant. The main vessel is covered with a flood of florals, in curling vines and blooms, as if taken over by the growth. Timothy Anglin Burgard, in his exhibition essay "Breathing Life into Glass" for the 2008 exhibition "Chihuly at the de Young," stated: “The vessel form serves as a foil for his true subject, the triumph of creativity over convention, of nature over culture, and of art over craft.”

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