VITRARIA Glass +A Museum
Palazzo Nani Mocenigo
Till 16.08. 2015
From Pablo Picasso to Jeff Koons, from Louise Bourgeois to Damien Hirst, from Lucio Fontana to Anish Kapoor. These are just a few of the more than a hundred modern and contemporary artists who have explored the world of jewellery and created surprising works of art, for the main part unknown to the wider public.
This incredible collection has been put together over the years by Diane Venet, the wife of the renowned artist Bernar Venet; she is a Parisian collector whose adopted home in New York. After having been exhibited in Roubaix, New York, Athens, Valencia, Miami, and Seoul, Precious – from Picasso to Jeff Koons has now arrived for the first time in Italy.
This is the complete collection of 161 jewels, some of which have never been exhibited before; they reveal an original approach to art unfolding along the entire piano nobile of the new, fascinating VITRARIA Glass +A Museum. VITRARIA Glass +A Museum is a new museum that opened to the public in September 2014 in the heart of Venice and at the starting point of the “museum mile” that runs from the Accademia Galleries to the Zattere.
VITRARIA Glass +A Museum has an interdisciplinary approach, one where “Glass” is the main theme together with its contamination with art, design, architecture, new technologies, and fashion… “+A” stands for Altro and pinpoints the museum’s wish to greatly enlarge its perspective in order to allow itself a certain liberty and to become a platform for meetings and exchanges between artists, designers, and the creative industries.
Precious is part of VITRARIA’s “+A” vocation which, with this second exhibition, expresses its freedom to investigate “otherness” by exploring such an incredible applied art as jewellery-making – an art so close to glass-making. The jewels on display are true works of art signed by the greatest contemporary artists; at times they are unique pieces, at others limited editions, but they all bear the unmistakable style of each “master”. Precious will allow the public to rediscover, from an unusual point of view, the development of many of the best-known artists from the 1950s until today.
Each jewel, conceived as a work of art to be worn, contains a personal history and has been designed by each artist with a particular person in mind: perhaps this very “intimate” aspect is what makes them even more fascinating.
In the permanent venue of Palazzo Barbarigo Nani Mocenigo, the former residence of Doge Agostino Barbarigo and historic “museum” of the Nani family’s archaeological collection, new cultural itineraries and perspectives disclose unexplored relationships and approaches.
Some historical notes: the palazzo was constructed from the 1450s onwards by Doge Agostino Barbarigo who bequeathed it to his two daughters on the condition that they shared the building in equal parts: this seems to be the reason it has two piani nobili. The Barbarigo family line ended with the daughters, and they married descendants of the Nani family. The palazzo then remained in the hands of the Nani for 500 years until a female descendant married into the Mocenigo family in the nineteenth century and took its surname.
For further information www.vitraria.com
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