The 12th of May La Galleria Nove Colonne/SPE/ II Giorno, opened Nives Marcassoli’s exhibition an artist from Ranica (Bergamo).
The exhibition will be open until the 31stof May. Marcassoli will be exhibiting glass sculptures that she has created between 2010 and 2011. As Gualtiero Merati writes: “Nives Marcassoli began her artistic career by painting. She uses a glass fusion technique which she started to study during the 1990’s. Especially noteworthy, amongst her many operas, is the stained glass window of the Church of SS Crocifisso in Pavia, which she projected, prepared and installed single handed.
This artist, from Lombardy begins her creations by drawing a picture on a thin sheet of glass. They are drawings of hands, conversing, touching or embracing, drawn with clear decisive strokes, almost hyperrealistic. To this sheet of glass she adds transparent and coloured glass chips, which is heat fused and shaped (Hot work) resulting in a work of art with an unmistakable atmosphere. Finally, the creation is cold worked (grinding, sanding or with the use of acids) The surface of these sculptures recall rippling waters, such as when a pebble has just skimmed a surface, leaving concentric circles. This opera which gave origin to all of the others is amongst the exhibition and is easily distinguished for its striking diversity, both in shape and colour. On the other side of the gallery some of the artist’s drawings are exhibited. This exhibition is without doubt an exhibition which invites us to discover this innovative technique and enjoy the enthralling results, sending us into a subtle, emotive dimension
Vitro Festival, Romont
Collective exposition at the Vitromusée in occasion of the "VitroFestival" in Romont (Swiss).
The Symposium: glass as creative element in architecture. An important conversation between artists, glass professionals and architecture professionals.
The Gallery: more than 100 works of contemporary glass artists, in different spaces in the city of Romont, with the presence of the artists themselves.
Profondo sentire - Profound sentiment
Forte Marghera – Venice October 2010, curated by Adolfina De Stefani e Barbara Codogno.
Participation in a collective international project WALKING-LAB: Melting pot-creation of artist's thoughts, the project WALKING FREEDOM FORT Forte Marghera, VE 2010.
PROFONDO SENTIRE/DEEP EMOTION, An oblivious herald becomes a fluttering of wings, awakened by the rustling for freedom that stirs still waters, ready to move on. Hot-worked glass, wood carvings, feather.
Di vetro e d'acqua - Of fire and water
Glass sculptures to capture the sky, to unite with the earth, to dominate fire - to express her belonging with water, the element in which her work and her spirit find place: hers are Water thoughts. Shapes - to make you feel one with Nature, to mark a memory, an emotion, to tell a shiver, an irony at times, to describe the place where Nives Marcassoli lives and works. There where the river flows, where the grass grows on the ditches and the croaking of tree frogs can be heard. An hymn to Nature, nourished by the Sense of Light, that transfigures the shape to enclose light, so as to let it filter through the glassy mass and keep it within. The effects are extraordinary, summoned by a wise alchemy and pervading all molecules, like reflections imprisoned in a treasure chest, in a glass prism, that returns purity.
Glass: the medium with which Nives expresses her talent, the glass so celebrated throughout time. Glass, that ancient and prodigious matter known in days of yore, charms the artist, who starts from an undefined mould and bestows a soul on the shape, born from the fusion and assembling of cut glasses. Nives senses her work by intuition, she elaborates it with her thought, then gives in to her creativity and leaves the final touch to the fire, guided and controlled with skill. And it is exactly to the secrets hidden in her strength, to conferring with the mysterious god, with the element that shapes and melts glassy matter, that she commits her project, her work. Nives's passion looks at a glass. Sculpture without being satisfied with a shape born by chance: she creates a second one, then a third one and even more, if the result is not what she desires. Towards the possibility of shaping the idea, of confirming the signs, the colors, of hosting metal elements, of creating smooth surfaces, but even rough or jagged ones. Giving birth to light shapes, transparent like organdie, like laces in a doll's dress: thus, a sculpture made of light, fragile and pink, by the name of "Passione d'organza".
And the glassy substance brims with color, it discovers its new identity, it transforms - abiding by the will of its creator - it transforms to meet a new expressivity as it bestows beauty. It is a result that stems from challenges, because this is the only way this woman can feel alive: it is the strength that urges her to overcome the limits, those of physics, those of the mind. It is there that Nives' work finds its roots. That élan towards continuous researching, towards creative action that accompanies man since the dawn of life. Charmed by glass, her passion for a long time, she gives life to (common) objects, brimming with intense chromatisms and elegant signs. Sculpture is then her natural landing place. It is not me that looked for it, it is sculpture that found me, as she herself said. Ail her preceding work and her latest devotion are the manifestation of but one language, a hymn to life originating from matter itself, a hymn to light - that gives expression - to water - that generates life itself - to the sky above us - where souls die. Life is a flimsy place, the sky is so close, as a great Italian photographer wrote. The stylistic figure of this eclectic artist describes a work in fieri, flush with stylistic references and solutions, profiting from noteworthy technical capabilities and creativity: a path, on a quest for a new three-dimensional expression, under the sign of an ancient modernity.
Love Art 2
Scorzé -Venice April 2010 curated by Cecilia Ci.
DIMMI SI (Tell me YES) It is the unreal colour of the heart, the transparency of a feeling, the strength of love hardened like iron, the prayer and the hope of a YES. It is the baited breath of he/she asking for a chance to abandon themselves to love. It is the key in the drawer in which a disappointed lover closed his/her heart. They are words yelled in hurt with the secret fear-hope that someone may find the key words again, and that someone may help us to say YES again to Love.
Giochi Sospesi - Suspended Games
Ranica-Bergamo Cultural Centre ”Roberto Gritti” February 2010
In the beginning of the 1900′s, many children in Europe quit playing early on to go work in the textile factories. Still today, many children in the world are destined to interrupt their age to play in favour of work and exploitation. With her experience in Hot casting, Nives has imprinted in the glass the highly expressive signs of an exploited youth, thereby giving a voice to an all-too current topic.
This sculpture reproduces and reinterprets the WORLD game (hopscotch), which we all know and have played in all continents since ancient times. From then until now, it has covered all the roads of the planet, and its form can be found, drawn with chalk or sticks, wherever children live. Its deeper and initiatory meaning has brought me to reflect on the condition of childhood from the early 1900's on As we have all played this game at least once in our childhoods, we know that one jumps from square to square, balancing oneself on one leg. I've interpreted this as a symbol of a childhood that is precarious, balancing itself between hunger and fieldwork, between the promise of a better future ahead and the effects of increasing industrialisation. The youngest workers of the Gioachino Zopfi spinning and weaving factory, in Ranica, Italy, in the early 1900's, had to suspend their playing at a very early age. These children's already precarious health was threatened by dangerous and hard work, in unhealthy conditions. In this work, I imagine a 10 year old boy who throws his stone in square 3 and starts on his way. One of the rules of this game is that if you lose your balance or you step on a line, as he did in squares 4 and 6, you have to start over. For him, this meant jumping from childhood to the world of work. I found the healds that I put in front of square 6 in the storerooms of the modern-day weaving in Ranica. They were used by the the Zopfi workers until 1983 in learning how to use the weaving mills. The price of the material is on square 8, reminding us that the workers (children included), worked up to 14 hours a day. Children were often victims of accidents of varying degrees (as can be read in the square with a document from the Ranica Archive with the company stamp -Gioachino Zopfi- factory in Bergamo, August, 1899- “Michele Piazzoli, 12 years of age, spinning worker for Giò Zopfi in Ranica, accidentally suffered from a wound in the sole of this left foot on the 9th of August. The wound will require about 10 days to heal. For Dr. Gandolfi… undersigned”). Although this reality seems a distant memory to us now, in many countries of the world children are still forced by adults, or by necessity, to SUSPEND GAMES. The continents are depicted in square 9: the more intensely coloured areas represent the still high percentage of child labour. The blood-red footprint and the shape of the game as I have depicted it recall the cross and represent a childhood and carefree spirit that have been suppressed and mortified. In the last square, one can just see, or think they see a word…..CIELO (sky)…. It is the symbol of a sky and of a serenity that are barely legible in the destinies of many children in the WORLD. Still today, many of them are not allowed to reach, jump by jump, struggle by struggle, the square we all aspire to reach from birth: a serene and reachable SKY.
