Preserving color, the delicacy of gesture in the works of Nives Marcassoli

Now in its 11th edition, Altare Vetro Arte is now a regular event, thanks to which the Altarese Museum of Glass Art, with its furnace present in the garden of Villa Rosa, is at the center of the dialogue between contemporary artists and master glassmakers.
This year, in conjunction with the International Year of Glass, the museum is pleased to present the solo exhibition of Nives Marcassoli, an artist close to painting as well as glassmaking.
Keeping the color – the delicacy of the gesture in the works of Nives Marcassoli, curated by Michela Murialdo, is an exhibition that gathers within the rooms of the museum a selection of works made with a personal technique conceived by the artist herself: hot-worked fused-cast glass. This work combines together different techniques such as painting, glass fusing, crucible casting, and mold casting. Alongside these works are others made with sand-casting, which consists of casting crucible glass in sand molds into which drawings and natural elements are inserted, which, in contact with the incandescent mass, are burned and incorporated within it. Nives Marcassoli’s production, based on these two processes, is articulated in a series of glass sculptures within which it is possible to observe different stratifications of elements: color, light, and drawing. The latter, recalling the gesture of the brushstroke, is obtained from a personal color palette made with colored glass treated as if it were watercolor. The drawings, inserted within the glass drippings, represent female figures and details of their bodies with a clear focus on the hands, the vehicle of the gesture, whether this is understood as movement or as a purely affective gesture and search for the other.
The exhibition “Preserving color, the delicacy of gesture in the works of Nives Marcassoli” is articulated as a complex narrative that leaves it up to time and the individual gaze to search within the transparency of the glass for all the artistic traces delicately guarded within it.

On the occasion of AVA – Altare Vetro Arte, Nives Marcassoli creates a new work, in collaboration with master glassmaker Jean Marie Bertaina, in the furnaces in the museum’s garden that will be lit and open to visitors from Friday, April 22 until Sunday, April 24.

In past editions Altare Vetro Arte has seen at work: Giuse Maggi (2020); Luciano Fiannacca, Enzo L’Acqua, Renza Sciutto (2011); Annamaria Gelmi Fukushi Ito, Carlo Nangeroni (2012); Enzo Esposito, Graziano Marini, Juan Segura (2013); Anna Caruso, Matteo Giagnacovo, Isabella Nazzarri (2014), Miriam Di Fiore (2016) and Silvia Levenson (2017), Angelo Cagnone (2018), Contemporary Argentine Artists (2019), while the 2015 edition was an opportunity to present the Museum’s Contemporary Glass Collection.

Altare Vetro Arte and Altare Vetro Design, conceived by Mariateresa Chirico and Enzo L’Acqua and promoted by the ISVAV (Institute for the Study of Glass and Glass Art) and the Museo dell’Arte Vetraria Altarese, involve designers and artists, invited to try their hand with glass, in a synergistic relationship with Altarese masters and others, in a mutual, intense and fruitful exchange of skills and knowledge. An opportunity to meet, dialogue, and compare in order to express, transmit and make their centuries-old “know-how” of Altare still current and alive. Therefore, not only the protection and study of the past – of which admirable example is the Museum with its prestigious and very unique collection – but also a research activity related to those who work in the world of glass today.