Venice, Italy
www.fornacemian.com
The residency is organized in collaboration with Fornace Mian and the Pentagram Stiftung Foundation.
The prize provides for the assignment of a residency period in which the artist can learn and experience the wonderful technique of Murano glass processing and implement the project submitted during the application.
FORNACE MIAN
A company epitomising an 1000-year-old tradition, Fornace Mian was established in 1962 and is now a leader in the artisan production of Murano glass furnishing lighting and accessories.
With its consolidated expertise, Fornace Mian’s product range stands out for the way it draws upon artisan skills handed down over the centuries to bring together an outstanding creative capacity with cutting edge technical solutions. Every single piece in Fornace Mian’s product range is the result of an artistic and cultural heritage that provides high-class creative responses to today’s markets which are increasingly demanding both in terms of design and technology.
PENTAGRAM STIFTUNG
Is a Swiss private Foundation established in 2011, based in Chur, Switzerland, whose mission is to study and promote art and design in the 20th and 21st centuries that feature glass as their main medium. Pentagram Stiftung aims to reappraise the importance of glass, especially in the art and history of Venice, as well as that of high-standard and innovative glassmaking in the contemporary art and design worlds.
In 2012 Pentagram Stiftung launched LE STANZE DEL VETRO [Rooms for Glass], a long-term joint initiative in collaboration with Fondazione Giorgio Cini, on the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice. LE STANZE DEL VETRO is a permanent exhibition space, which hosts solo and group shows featuring international artists and glass manufacturers from the 20th and 21st centuries, who have used glass as an original means to express their own personal aesthetics. The aim of LE STANZE DEL VETRO is to illustrate the many different potential uses of the medium and to bring glass back into the centre of the international art stage.
Moreover, Pentagram Stiftung and Fondazione Giorgio Cini have set up a GLASS STUDY CENTRE within the Institute of Art History of the Fondazione Cini to establish a comprehensive archive of Venetian glass, the first of its kind, where original drawings, photographs, letters and all kind of documents, ephemeral and not, are collected to save them from permanent loss and make them available to the academic community. A specialised library has been created and is available to scholars and artists interested in the history and technology of glassmaking.
