Artist of MonthJuneSantillana

Artist of the Month, June 2009

Laura de Santillana

Arancio, 2008, 23¼" x 23¾" x 18"
Hand-blown and shaped glass

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Italian glass artist, Laura de Santillana [b. 1955] is the granddaughter of the noted and widely respected founder of the Venini Glassworks, Paolo Venini and the daughter of Ludovico Diaz de Santillana, the firm’s Director from 1959 until 1986. She creates richly saturated, organic and sensual forms, producing innovative and masterfully executed works in varying techniques.

Laura de Santillana is featured in this year’s prestigious Venice Biennale (June 1 – November 22, 2009) in the Venice Pavilion’s exhibition, “…Fa come natura face in foco – Dante.” Also in 2009, Barry Friedman Ltd. will present *Venice \| 3 Artists \| 3 Visions*, a 10-year retrospective of work by three of the most important artists working in glass today: Cristiano Bianchin, Yoichi Ohira and Laura de Santillana (October 29, 2009 – January 16, 2010)
	Art historian and Curator of the Corning Museum of Glass, Tina Oldknow, has written, “Laura de Santillana is one of the most exciting glass artists in Europe today. Her profound connection to the natural world and the realm of the senses lie at the heart of her subtle, Zen-inspired designs, which are produced on Murano by the island’s unparalleled glass masters. The artist takes advantage of the natural qualities of glass, but is not a slave to it. Her designs result from a rigorous dialectic that takes place long before a model or rendering reaches the hot-shop floor.”
A highly regarded colorist, de Santillana’s series titled Tokyo-Ga recall color field paintings, however these glass stele have a luminous quality nearly impossible to achieve with paint and canvas. Her glass sculptures are blown and shaped into architectonic tablets, thus creating spontaneous and enigmatic interior spaces.
	Inspired by Bhuddist temples and revisiting an earlier body of work derived from natural forms such as stones, mountains, and craters, Ms. de Santillana’s Bodhis are voluptuous monochromatic closed forms with silvered interiors which add a lustrous glow and an unexpected character of iodized metal. Resting on the ground in varying sizes and groupings, each Bodhi reverently echoes the stance of Buddhist monks in prayer.
de Santillana’s newest body of work, Meteors, further explores the organic forms of the Stones and Mountains series. These cratered and irregular shapes of iridescent glass exude an extraterrestrial quality that mimics the state of the meteor as it falls through space.
	Laura de Santillana was born in Venice, Italy in 1955 and studied visual arts in New York. Following her sojourn in the United States, Ms. de Santillana returned to Venice where she collaborated with her father Ludovico Diaz de Santillana at Venini until the company was sold in 1986. In 1985, Ms. De Santillana was the recipient of Germany’s Coburger Glaspreis.
Laura de Santillana’s works are represented in many private and public collections, including the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution, New York; Corning Museum of Glass, New York; Denver Art Museum, Colorado; Kunstsammlungen der Veste Coburg, Germany; Kunstmuseum im Ehrenhof, Dusseldorf, Germany; Musée de Arts Décoratifs, Paris; Museo Vetrario di Murano, Venice; Museum of Modern Art, Sao Paulo, Brazil; Seattle Art Museum, Washington.