Venice Exhibition to showcase beauty and history of Hungarian glass art

A group exhibition entitled Glass Art NOW! will be presented at the Ateneo Veneto in Venice, Italy, showcasing almost a hundred exhibits of Hungarian glass art between 2 and 15 September, as part of the 7th Venice Glass Week international glass art festival.

Glass Art NOW! will review the highlights of the history of glass art in Hungary. In addition to works from the history of glass, some forty contemporary Hungarian glass artists have been given the opportunity to exhibit, alongside well-known glass artists and young talents.

Glass Art NOW! will present the history of glass in the Carpathian Basin from Roman excavations to the present day, in connection with the Bohus-Lugossy Foundation‘s research project “A Thousand Years of Hungarian Glass.” The curators have grouped the objects of glass history into four thematic units, under the names of the cities of Rome, Venice, Veszprém (western Hungary), and Salgótarján (northern Hungary).

Erzsébet N. Hamza (1944-2022) – Vases, 1980. Source: Glass Art NOW!

Visitors can listen to the short stories in Italian and English by scanning QR codes placed on the tables of the four thematic display cases, while those who wish to read the full stories in depth can do so on the exhibition website, according to the press release.

The glass history objects were selected from Hungarian museums and private collectors by the curator of the exhibition, András B. Szilágyi, art historian and assistant professor at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, and Szonja Dohnál, co-curator and art historian and deputy director of the House of Arts in Veszprém.

The exhibition of contemporary glass art was created with the participation of about forty artists, ten of whom created completely new works for the first Hungarian glass art exhibition in Venice. The exhibition was created with the support of the Veszprém-Balaton 2023 European Capital of Culture program, as the Veszprém region stands as one of the key centers of glass art in Hungary.

György Buczkó (1950-): Composition in black I. glass sculpture

The city hosts one of the country’s largest collections of contemporary and historical glass art at the Laczkó Dezső Museum. The museum’s glass collection is represented with significant works at the Glass Art NOW! exhibition.

In conjunction with the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale (18th International Architecture Exhibition), the exhibition will also present a 1:100 scale architectural model of the European Museum of Contemporary Glass Art, the Space Spiral.

Palazzo Loredan, home to The Venice Glass Week, will showcase the work of twenty international glass artists, including five renowned Hungarian glass artists, who are represented in the exhibition in collaboration with the Bohus-Lugossy Foundation.