Chahan Revived a Mysterious Venetian Palazzo. Now It Hosts Marcantonio’s Unknown Vessels
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A must-see exhibition will open next month for the annual Venice Glass Week in one of the most exciting locations in town. The Palazzo, recently unveiled, is the former residence of countess and businesswoman Elsie Lee Gozzi, who, after taking over the legendary fabric factory Fortuny in the 1940s, had established herself in the villa next door, on Giudecca island. In April, the space was revived by the legendary Parisian design gallery Chahan and its eponymous founder, Chahan Minassian, who, in the historical setting, mixed contemporary artworks and furniture with Fortuny’s fabrics. Now – starting September 14, 2024 – Chahan will host Marcantonio’s next solo show, exhibiting his latest pieces from the series Unknown. Made employing a self-taught technique that generates instinctive and spontaneous shapes, Marcantonio’s glass sculptural vases result from evolving experimentation with cotissi – irregular glass rocks leftover from the glassmaking process – that he combines under a crystal coating in massive colorful compositions.
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New Forms of Art and Contagious Illness
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Book tip by Veronika Rubakha
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This month’s book tip is by Veronika Rubakha, Laguna~B’s store manager who has a background in finance and art management, and loves reading about different art forms.
“I was immediately attracted by the cover, featuring a black and white photograph of Alexander Archipenko’s 1920 sculpture Concave of L’espace. He was a prominent Ukrainian avant-garde artist and one of the first to apply the Cubist principles to sculpture.
New Forms of Art and Contagious Illness – edited and translated by literary theorist Andrew Hodgson in 2023 and published by New Documents – was originally written a century ago by Carl Julius Salomonsen, a Danish medical scientist and respected epidemiologist credited with demonstrating tuberculosis’s contagious nature.
Aside from his medical job, Salomonsen also gave lectures on a new “epidemic” he had identified: The increasing spread of modern art. The three pamphlets resulting from his lectures are among the first documented rejections of modernist art. He described Expressionism as a symptom of a mental disease he called “Dysmorphism,” the same went for other art movements ending in ‘-ism’: Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism. In his view, Modern art was proof of the encroaching decay of civilization and a symptom of a contagious disease that urgently needed treatment.”
The B~Library is an exciting Laguna~B side project. It is a book collection curated (and continuously updated) by @studio.bruno located at Spazio, in Dorsoduro 3276, Venice. Anyone can borrow any book every day from 10 AM to 7 PM. Come and visit! |
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Our Connection to the Lagoon
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Our new limited edition glass AMAZO – just 12 pieces – will launch September 6. Stay tuned 👀
On September 22, a jury will announce the winner of the Autonoma Residency Prize, our annual competition for young talents in the glass field.
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Every month we update our Diary with behind-the-scenes photos from our everyday life at Laguna~B.
Check our August album here! |
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