Vanitas_The Venice Glass Week_Hotel Bauer, Venezia

Lilla Tabasso, biologist, designer and artisan, was born in Milan, Italy in 1973, where she still lives and works.
Following her studies at the Faculty of Biology at the University in Milan, she began working with Murano glass using the ancient techniques of blowing and modelling at the flame.

Her artistic research is focused on Botany, her centre of interest, combined with the complex practice of hand-made Glass. Her works are vases of flowers of incredible realism that draw from nature an infinite palette of colours, limpid shades and also – fundamentally for the artist – mutations and imperfections: dry branches, faded flowers and wilting leaves. These are some features that can be seen in Vanitas, a work that lends its title to this exhibition.

Thanks to her past studies and “golden-hands”, Lilla Tabasso harks back to the “still life” genre,  and gives shape to an iper-verism and an extreme naturalism.  This research, by setting itself on a scale of micro-detail within the forms and colours of every Flower, analyses with lucidity and detachment how the expressive potentialities of Nature exceed those of Humankind.

When considering Lilla Tabasso’s work, it is impossible not to mention the work by The Blaschkas, father and son, who were glass masters from Bohemia. In the 19th Century, following a major commission from the main museums of natural sciences in America, they focused on recreating an incredible number of species of flora and fauna for scientific purposes. The most famous example is the Blaschka Collection in Harvard, made by Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka from 1887 to 1936, and commissioned by Prof. George Lincoln Goodale, founder of the Botanical Museum. The collection contains more than 4,000 models and 847 species replicated in life-size.

The event was part of the programme of the Venice Glass Week 2017.