Federica Marangoni ON THE ROAD
1970-2024
Non solo vetro

From 19 May to 24 November 2024
Murano, Glass Museum, Spazio Ex Conterie

Curated by
Chiara Squarcina
Federica Marangoni

The exhibition retraces the long career of the Venetian artist and designer Federica Marangoni, focusing on her special relationship with glass and Murano, from her early works in this material to the present. In all these years, the artist has experimented with different materials and technological media, ranging with an eclectic and interdisciplinary approach across all sectors of communication and accompanying her career as a sculptor with work as a designer.

In 1970 she opened her Fedra Studio Design in Venice and started using glass, working regularly with many Murano glassworks. She designs objects for production, as well as glass sculptures and large installations, in which technological media such as videos and neon lights, combined with the transparency and fragility of glass, make her work unique on the contemporary art scene. Since the mid-1970s, electronic technology has been one of her principal means of expression.

From 1976 to 1989 she was an adjunct professor at the Department of Art and Artistic Education at New York University, for which she held seminars and summer courses in Venice with a workshop on glass. She gives lectures and courses at other universities and cultural centres in the United States, exhibiting in numerous international museums and galleries.

This exhibition will be presented in various spaces of the Museo del Vetro, forming a fascinating layout in dialogue with the architecture of the venue. The entrance will host the work La bricola, created as a light installation on a mirror floor for Euro-Domus in Turin in 1971. In the garden there will be some large multimedia sculptures, including the great rainbow Continuity from 2006, created for the patio of the Italian Institute of Culture in Madrid. The portico will host some glass works from the 1980s, focusing on the theme of the garden and its symbolic implications. The “Lightness Room” will exhibit works made between 1987 and 2002 recalling the concepts of air, light, flight, beauty, archetypes of ancient and yet eternal memories.

The “ex Conterie” space will be divided into five sections: “The Fragile Dream. 1970s and ’80s”, including the group Natura sotto vetro; “Electronics the Mother of a Humanist Dream”, exploring the artist’s research into the use of technology in glass works and electronics in art and communication; “Itineraries of Memory”, with the large fountain sculpture La trappola della memoria, a public work for the 1992 Expo in Seville; “The Trace”, a section intended to show particularly that design thinking does not stop but is rather a labyrinth where experiences, dreams, metaphors and references to history are clustered and return as the very flow of memory and dream; “Flight”, with the grandiose installation Il volo impossibile, already exhibited in Valencia and Barcelona.

Admission to the exhibition from 19 May to 24 November 2024, with the Museum’s hours and ticket.