新展｜“玻璃应力”即将开放，56位艺术家带你通过“玻璃艺术”了解现当代艺术的演进

玻璃应力

现代艺术演变

在威尼斯

Glass has been closely intertwined with the development of human civilization throughout history. The melting and forming processes fostered its unique craft attributes, making it an enduring vehicle for aesthetic, symbolic, and conceptual expression. Berengo Studio in Italy has carried forward the glassmaking tradition of Murano, Venice, and the cross-disciplinary collaboration practice established since the mid-20th century. Its exhibition series “Glasstress,” serving as a collateral event of the Venice Biennale since 2009, has gradually evolved into a crucial international platform where glass and fine art converge.

Rooted in this rich legacy, the exhibition Glasstress: The Modern Art Revolution in Venice, seeks to re-examine the evolution of modern art through the lens of glass. It focuses on how glass has integrated into the conceptual framework of art and continues to generate new artistic languages through cross-disciplinary collaboration, material experimentation, and cultural exchange.

This exhibition brings together 56 prominent artists from over 20 countries, showcasing more than 60 artworks. Unfolding across four thematic sections — The Language of Matter, The Estranged Commonplaces, The Narratives of Identity, and The Renaissance of the Past — the exhibition presents the multifaceted possibilities of glass in the contemporary art context, providing Chinese audiences with a fresh perspective on the medium of glass and a renewed understanding of modern art.

参展艺术家

British artist Tony Cragg, laureate of the 1988 Turner Prize, is regarded as one of the leading figures in the realm of contemporary sculpture. He is renowned for his innovative exploration of form and material within contemporary art. His works often present a state of stillness that is simultaneously brimming with kinetic energy—as if frozen in the very process of growth, rotation, or accumulation—creating sculptural forms that exist in the liminal space between natural morphology and industrial order.

German artist Josepha Gasch-Muche is renowned for her unique and highly expressive glass sculptures. She extends the formal vocabulary and material philosophy of the Bauhaus into contemporary glass art. By arranging thousands of industrial glass shards into geometric configurations, she reveals the profound visual dynamism of glass within light and shadow.

American artist Sean Scully is recognized as one of the most influential abstract painters. He is celebrated for his large-scale abstract paintings composed of horizontal and vertical bands, interlocking color blocks, and gradated geometric motifs. Through these geometric forms, his works serve as vessels for emotions, memories, and spiritual landscapes.

Chinese artist Gu Liming is a leading figure in Chinese abstract art. He is recognized for deconstructing traditional cultural symbols through a modern lens. His practice frequently incorporates ink rubbing, collage, mineral textures, and charcoal scumbling to establish a contemporary expression imbued with a poetic Eastern sensibility across painting and other media.

Dutch artist Ted Noten is a pioneering jewelry designer whose avant-garde, conceptual practice expands the boundaries of traditional jewelry design. Characterized by an exquisite and luxurious exterior, his works frequently encapsulate symbolic objects within transparent materials, yielding a compelling visual allure and profound conceptual resonance.

Polish artist Marta Klonowska is a contemporary sculptor who works primarily with glass. She is celebrated for her animal sculptures meticulously assembled from glass shards. Her subjects are frequently drawn from the marginalized animals found in classical paintings. By harnessing the paradoxical materiality of shattered glass—fragile yet sharp, dazzling yet dangerous—she reconstructs these animal figures.

American artist Dustin Yellin’s multidisciplinary practice encompasses mixed-media installations and collage. He is best known for his intricate body of work composed of stacked layers of glass, constructing volumetric narratives through transparent yet densely stratified structures.

German artist Thomas Schütte is a masterful figure in contemporary art, distinguished by his highly idiosyncratic style and critical conceptual approach. He was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2005. His practice frequently conveys humor, irony, and contemplation through the formation of distorted, surreal human figures.

Italian artist Mimmo Paladino is a prominent figure of the Transavanguardia movement. His practice integrates primordial symbols—such as mythological motifs and classical iconography—with natural forms including human figures, flora, and fauna. Bridging historical legacy with contemporary visual expression, he spearheaded the shift away from Minimalism and Conceptual Art, championing a return to symbolic narrative and emotive expression.

Chinese designer Zhang Lei seamlessly merges industrial design thinking with artistic creation, driving a synergy between function and aesthetics. His design practice emphasizes the sensory experience derived from material textures and the aesthetic of order inherent in industrial precision.

Chinese artist Bai Ming is renowned as a leading figure in contemporary Chinese ceramic art. His practice has long focused on the innovative fusion of traditional mediums and modern visual language. Rooted in the philosophy of awakening the “essence of materials,” his works emphasize inherent textures and traces of craftsmanship, culminating in an aesthetic that is both ethereal and deeply philosophical.

Italian contemporary artist Maria Grazia Rosin places glass at the very core of her artistic practice. Through the synthesis of color, light, technology, and fluid organic forms, her work investigates life, natural ecologies, and visual perception.

César Baldaccini ranks among the most significant sculptors of post-war France, serving as a central figure in the Nouveau Réalisme movement. By compressing automobiles, industrial materials, and readymades into dense blocks, he transforms familiar everyday objects into art forms imbued with visual tension and raw power through their distortion, accumulation, and collapse.

Renowned for challenging and expanding established artistic vocabularies and cognitive frameworks, British artist Fiona Banner has profoundly influenced the contemporary art landscape. She frequently reconstructs objects such as fighter jets and weaponry, manipulating scale and materiality to subvert their authoritative connotations of power and speed, thereby exposing the inherent fragility and instability beneath these imposing symbols.

American artist Michael Joo is a prominent figure in the international contemporary art arena whose practice continuously probes the boundaries of human cognition. Working across diverse media—including installation, video, and painting—he seamlessly integrates methodologies of natural science into his work, manifesting a symbiotic coexistence between art and science.

Spanish designer Jaime Hayon is widely recognized as a pivotal figure in shaping the design aesthetics of the new millennium. He seamlessly navigates the intersection of design and contemporary art. Renowned for their rich narrative depth, whimsical imagination, and masterful craftsmanship, Hayon’s works forge a highly distinctive visual identity through anthropomorphic and theatrical formal languages.

British artist Cornelia Parker is widely regarded as one of the most influential conceptual sculptors of her generation. Primarily working with large-scale installations, she dedicates her practice to the transformation and suspension of everyday objects. By orchestrating visually striking scenes where objects appear frozen in mid-explosion or shattered in mid-air, she reinterprets these items to explore the latent energy and tension embedded within the mundane.

Spanish artist Javier Pérez is widely recognized as a leading figure in contemporary installation art. His practice frequently utilizes traces of existence to express the inherent fragility and latent strength of life, imbuing his works with a duality—a delicate, exquisite beauty inextricably intertwined with an unsettling sense of dread.

American artist Polly Apfelbaum is widely recognized as a pivotal figure in the Post-Minimalist movement. Her practice recontextualizes historically feminine crafts and decorative palettes, seamlessly merging visual delight with conceptual rigor.

Polish artist Miros?aw Ba?ka, who represented Poland at the 1993 Venice Biennale, is widely regarded as a leading figure in contemporary Polish art. At the core of his practice is a profound investigation into critical themes such as memory and oblivion, trauma and healing. His works frequently evoke a stark and austere atmosphere, asserting a silent yet imposing presence within the space.

Italian artist Loris Cecchini’s multidisciplinary practice spans sculpture, installation, painting, and photography. His distinctive artistic vocabulary is celebrated as a masterful paradigm that bridges biology, architecture, and contemporary aesthetics. By harnessing technological processes and diverse mediums, he simulates natural forms and their organic growth, constructing large-scale installations through modular structures and repetitive units.

Australian artist Penny Byrne has forged a distinctive practice at the intersection of traditional craftsmanship and contemporary conceptualism. Through the restoration and subversion of antique ceramic figurines, her practice delivers a sharp satire on violence and warfare. While her works preserve a classical elegance and formal refinement, the deliberate introduction of ubiquitous contemporary symbols generates a compelling tension.

British artist Charles Avery has, since 2004, devoted his practice to “The Islanders,” an ever-expanding fictional world rendered through an elaborate constellation of drawings, texts, objects, and architectural propositions that together map the cosmology of an imagined island.

French artist Laure Prouvost was awarded the Turner Prize in 2013. Her works weave together video, sound, sculpture, found objects, text, and performance within immersive environments, constructing labyrinthine sensory experiences that captivate and disorient in equal measure.

Italian artist Emilio Isgrò is among the most internationally acclaimed and pioneering figures in the field of text-based art, known worldwide for his distinctive language of “erasure.” His works typically involve the selective obliteration, covering, or deletion of printed text using ink or pigment, leaving behind clusters, lines, or voids on the page—so that what is absent becomes, paradoxically, the more powerful statement, drawing viewers into active interpretation and reflection.

Austrian artist Erwin Wurm is among the most inventive and recognizable figures in contemporary art. Through his iconic One Minute Sculptures and his practice of anthropomorphizing, exaggerating, and distorting everyday objects, he addresses issues of consumer culture and bodily anxiety while expanding the definition of sculpture beyond physical matter into the realms of time, behavior, and relationship.

Iranian-born artist Fariba Ferdosi has long centered her practice on questions of culture and identity, weaving natural imagery and cultural symbols into layered metaphor.

Belgian artist Koen Vanmechelen’s practice constitutes a long-term, expansive ecological art project that integrates sculpture, installation, biological experimentation, and scientific research. Since launching The Cosmopolitan Chicken Project in 1999—crossbreeding purebred chickens from different countries and regions to explore the origins and evolution of life and civilization—he has generated a rich body of artworks.

Iraqi artist Halim Al-Karim creates work that is deeply shaped by the entanglement of personal biography and collective history, exerting a significant influence on contemporary photography and conceptual art in the Middle East. The visual impairment he sustained from wartime trauma gave rise to his distinctive aesthetic of “concealed vision” and “hazy invisibility.” His works frequently employ image-processing techniques or layers of silk and gauze over photographic portraits, dissolving recognizable features into a dreamlike state of vulnerability and disorientation.

American artist Judy Chicago is among the most pivotal founders of the contemporary feminist art movement. Her practice has sought to recover the histories and experiences of women long marginalized within the canon, bringing female labor, corporeality, emotion, and the arc of life into the realm of serious artistic inquiry. Her iconic work The Dinner Party, widely considered the first monumental feminist artwork, is permanently held in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum.

Lebanese artist Marya Kazoun is a multidisciplinary artist whose life and work have been shaped by war, migration, and the convergence of multiple cultural traditions. Her practice frequently intertwines mythological symbolism with spatial installation to address ecological crisis and the future of humanity. She is known for her command of everyday and industrial materials—textiles, rope, metal—which she weaves, wraps, and binds into works charged with spiritual intensity and emotional tension.

American artist Jimmie Durham is a major figure in the landscape of contemporary art, awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2019 Venice Biennale. Born in the American South, Durham was deeply involved in the African American and Indigenous civil rights movements of the 1960s and 70s. His practice spans sculpture, installation, performance, and photography, and is marked by a predilection for combining natural and manufactured materials in hybrid assemblages that probe the charged terrain of colonial history, Indigenous identity, and cultural power.

American artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons is a Cuban-born interdisciplinary artist and recipient of the 2023 MacArthur Fellowship. Drawing on personal experience, she forges deep connections between colonial history, religious traditions, and female experience within the framework of contemporary art. Her works frequently employ culturally resonant materials—indigo dye, sugarcane, rum, vintage photographs, mirrors, textiles—to construct fields of memory.

Nigerian artist Osaru Obaseki is an emerging voice in contemporary art, recognized for her emotionally and spiritually charged mixed-media practice. Her work synthesizes painting, collage, and material experimentation, layering diverse materials into surfaces that read like geological strata.

Spanish artist Jaume Plensa is an internationally acclaimed master of public art, celebrated for his monumental figurative sculptures and site-specific installations permanently sited in over one hundred cities worldwide. Among them, Crown Fountain is widely regarded as a defining achievement of contemporary public art. His practice characteristically takes the form of colossal, contemplative human heads with closed eyes, or large-scale structures woven from letters, text, and metal mesh, exploring the interrelation of body, language, and thought. Through his signature cross-cultural lens, he folds philosophical inquiry into visual form, guiding viewers to reflect on the boundaries of self-restraint and perception in modern society.

Swedish artist Marie-Louise Ekman is a prominent figure in Nordic contemporary art, recipient of Sweden’s Guldbagge Award and the Prince Eugen Medal. Her practice encompasses film and theater direction, painting, and installation, distinguished by a visual language that fuses comic-strip vividity, theatrically charged figures, and cinematic staging to address serious concerns beneath a veneer of wit.

Belgian artist Arne Quinze is known for his dynamic, large-scale public sculptures and installations. His practice revolves around themes of social interaction and the presence of nature within the urban fabric, frequently assembling vast quantities of slender wooden strips into monumental, vibrantly colored, rhythmically organic forms sited in the city to challenge its order and indifference.

British artist Chila Kumari Singh Burman has garnered wide recognition for a practice that fuses Indian mythology, Bollywood aesthetics, and popular culture. Centering on the Indian diaspora experience and female identity, her work deploys a riotously vivid visual language to engage with cultural memory and the politics of belonging.

Italian artist Massimo Lunardon is a glass artist who marries traditional glassmaking craft with a modern design sensibility, frequently working in borosilicate glass to create imaginative sculptural forms.

American artist Tony Oursler is a pioneer of contemporary new media and installation art, groundbreaking in his fusion of video projection with sculpture, dolls, and performance to create spatially present entities. His work is at once uncanny and direct, frequently anchoring itself in faces, eyes, and mouths that speak to the loneliness, vulnerability, and yearning for connection endemic to an age of information overload.

Russian artist Anna Jermolaewa grounds her practice in the study of everyday life, material culture, and social transformation, bringing together objects and images from disparate contexts to create visual scenes charged with narrative tension and contemplative stillness.

Chinese artist Qiu Zhijie is one of the leading figures of Chinese contemporary experimental art, with a practice rooted in the study of traditional culture and social realities. His work spans ink painting, calligraphy, installation, and performance, emphasizing a sustained dialogue between art and technology, history, and the conditions of contemporary life.

Chinese artist Wu Jian’an is a leading figure in the contemporary transformation of traditional Chinese culture. His practice is deeply informed by Chinese folk crafts and ancient mythological texts, synthesizing archaic totems, philosophical speculation, and contemporary visual culture into a visual theater suffused with primal mystery.

Egyptian artist Wael Shawky is known for a practice defined by deep historical engagement and cultural archaeology, and is a key figure for understanding the intersection of Arab world history and contemporary art. His works frequently deploy puppets, masks, and similar devices to generate a fable-like quality and deliberate distance, questioning historical truth while exploring issues of religious history and contested identity within a space where the real and the fictive converge.

Ukrainian artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov are among the most influential collaborative partnerships in international contemporary art. Their practice revolves around themes of emigration, memory, and utopia, constructing complete, immersive environments accompanied by text, sound, and objects that narrate the stories of their imagined “inhabitants.”

American artist Fred Wilson is one of the most influential conceptual artists of our time, awarded the MacArthur Fellowship in 1999. His practice involves selecting, recontextualizing, and rearranging existing historical artifacts and artworks within museum settings, altering their original contexts and narrative logic to expose what mainstream history has overlooked or distorted—producing works whose elegant surfaces belie a penetrating questioning of history and present reality.

American artist Karen LaMonte is renowned for her monumental, exquisitely detailed female gown sculptures cast in glass, ceramic, and bronze, and stands as one of the foremost figures in contemporary glass art. Her works, though composed of hard, weighty materials, convey the silken softness of folds and drape, and through this material paradox express ideas of the absent body, the trace of presence, and material as a bearer of historical memory.

Italian artist Monica Bonvicini is a pivotal figure in contemporary critical art practice, awarded the Golden Lion at the 1999 Venice Biennale. Her work deconstructs and recombines architectural and industrial elements—rebar, glass, chains, leather, neon—to interrogate how space is designed to shape and control human behavior and relationships, with particular attention to the latent violence, desire, and tension embedded within.

British artist Mat Collishaw is a founding member of the Young British Artists (YBAs). His work is distinguished by a seductive visual opulence that merges classical artistic language with contemporary technology, producing illusionistic viewing experiences.

Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos is internationally celebrated for her exuberant, large-scale installations, and was the first female artist to hold a solo exhibition at the Palace of Versailles. She is adept at deconstructing traditional aesthetics through everyday materials and amplified scale, frequently employing textiles, plastic vessels, and kitchen utensils, assembling them into vividly colored, structurally complex installations of architectural proportion.

Belgian artist Hans Op de Beeck is a leading voice in the realm of immersive installation and cinematic narrative. He is known for constructing complete scenes or miniature worlds that hover between reality and fiction, rendered predominantly in muted grays and monochromes to evoke a hushed, contemplative atmosphere.

Brazilian artist Vik Muniz is a contemporary visual artist who bridges fine art and popular culture, with a documentary film nominated for an Academy Award. His practice meticulously recreates iconic art-historical works or well-known images using everyday materials—chocolate syrup, toys, dust—with photography as the final medium of presentation.

Italian artist Antonio Riello is a cross-media conceptual artist whose early incorporation of video games and other electronic virtual forms into artistic expression provided an important reference point for the development of contemporary digital art. He excels at displacing, splicing, and altering disparate objects and materials, producing works that are lighthearted and wry on the surface yet laced with irony and contemplation.

American artist Robert Wilson is a polymath who works as theater and opera director, stage and lighting designer, and architect, hailed as a “beacon of experimental theater” and awarded the Golden Lion at the 1993 Venice Biennale. His practice has fundamentally transformed contemporary theatrical aesthetics, shaping the stage into a kinetic art installation through the orchestration of light, space, and time.

Mexican artist Pedro Friedeberg is a Surrealist designer and visual artist whose Hand Chair has become an iconic symbol in the history of design. His practice merges Surrealism, Op Art, and Baroque ornamentation into works of elaborate, hallucinatory intensity.

Chinese artist Li Jing works from a foundation of traditional glass-blowing and hot-sculpting techniques, exploring the multifaceted expressive potential of glass within the context of contemporary art. his practice aims not merely to establish a recognizable glass craft vocabulary, but to convey potent ideas and intentions while offering viewers a fresh aesthetic experience and open space for diverse interpretations.

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