LIVIO SEGUSO
15 October 2019–30 September 2021
Murano, Glass Museum
Curated by
Chiara Squarcina
Scientific direction
Gabriella Belli
The year 2018 will end at the Glass Museum with a major tribute to Livio Seguso, the brilliant Murano master of contemporary glass, whose works are recognisable for their extreme creative quality, in which glass dialogues with other materials in an innovatory way.
An internationally renowned artist, Seguso has been a pioneer in the use of glass as an expressive medium for art since the 1970s and continues his work today with constantly original proposals. Born in 1930 in Murano, where he still lives and works, Seguso’s relationship with glass began very young, out of his fascination with the inexhaustible enchantment of this marvellous material.
In 1972 he took part in the 36th Venice Biennale, but his art reached its peak towards the end of that decade when he completely abandoned Murano’s traditional heritage to focus solely on pure, iridescent and ambiguous crystal in all its transparency. His works assumed forms of absolute purity, becoming “images of light” that seem to adapt themselves to thought before disappearing into a series of dreamlike forms. Later, his experiments went beyond glass to involve other materials, such as steel, stone, marble, granite, and finally wood.
Seguso’s work has been exhibited more than 150 times in Italy and around the world, including the 42nd Venice Art Biennale in 1986 and in 1995 Arte Laguna, with the patronage of the Venice Biennale. Among the most important exhibitions: Ca’ Pesaro – International Gallery of Modern Art in 1980, Palazzo Ducale in Mantua in 1981, Castello Sforzesco in Milan in 1982, National Gallery in Prague in 1984, Casa dei Carraresi, Treviso in 2007, National Museum of History, Taipei, Taiwan in 2008, culminating in the major 2014 exhibition at the Ukai Museum in Hakone, Tokyo, where he showed unpublished sculptures, paintings and drawings. In 2015 Livio Seguso received the “Glass in Venice” Lifetime Achievement Award, presented by the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia and the Veneto Institute of Sciences, Letters and Arts.
