This exhibition, A Furnace in Marseille is the first in Venice, featuring a representative selection of works from the Cirva collection. The event is staged simultaneously at two important sites in Venice devoted to contemporary creativity and imaginative thinking: LE STANZE DEL VETRO and the Querini Stampalia Foundation.

The choice of works for the LE STANZE DEL VETRO section centres on ten artists who have left behind them pregnant memories and major pieces for the collection and the Cirva story. Each of the dedicated rooms emphasises how research, experiment and the artists’ immersion in the Cirva workshop have been crucial to their work. Thus, Larry Bell, Lieven De Boeck, Pierre Charpin, Erik Dietman, Thomas Kovachevich, Giuseppe Penone, Jana Sterbak, Martin Szekely, Robert Wilson and Terry Winters each find here a private space devoted to their work and their worlds. 

Visitors will encounter very different impacts, different tempos, in a space-and-time experience renewed in each room thanks to the unique relationship each artist has cultivated towards life, creativity, his or her raw materials, and with the workshop. 

Along the way, the displays engender physical shifts, currents of thought and feeling, that shun linearity for discrete worlds which rub shoulders organically, rather than flow into one another.

The contemporary art space on the third floor of the Querini Stampalia hosts instead the work of eight artists (Dove Allouche, James Lee Byars, Giuseppe Caccavale, Hreinn Fridfinnsson, Philippe Parreno, Francisco Tropa, Remo Salvadori, Jana Sterbak) who have shown how glasswork is more a question of translation than of ideas, or rather, the passage from one to the other, the making concrete of a form arising out of an idea.“

curators: Isabelle Reiher and Chiara Bertola, scenography and graphism: Sylvain Roca

Photos: photos: Enrico Fiorese, Sylvain Roca