Guglielmo Maggini | Il vetro mentre appare

z2o Sara Zanin is pleased to announce the exhibition Il vetro mentre appare by Guglielmo Maggini at Domus Orsoni, Venice. 

 

Guglielmo Maggini’s exhibition stems from the artist residency he undertook in April 2026 at the Orsoni furnace in Venice, as part of the Orsoni Art & Culture programme. This period of research and experimentation led the artist to engage with glass for the first time, establishing a direct relation-ship with the materials, gestures and rhythms of production within the historic Venetian furnace.  Rather than approaching glass through its spectacular qualities, Maggini focuses on its less visible moments: the incandescent material drawn from the crucible, the traces that fall onto the floor during production, fractures and remnants, and that fleeting in-stant when the glass, still hot and malleable, can be diverted from its intended form. Two bodies of work emerge from this observation.
The Scie take shape from the fine strands of molten glass produced during the daily movements of the furnace, which cool and break as they fall to the floor. 
Maggini gathers these ephemeral traces and transforms them into a memory of the gesture. Fractures are reassembled using resin—a material already present in his practice—as a contemporary mortar, while fragments of mosaic and gold leaf establish a direct connection with Orsoni’s identity.
The Gorgoni, by contrast, emerge during the rolling process, when glass is normally flattened into sheets. Maggini intervenes before this process is complete, shaping the material while it is still hot, folding and curling it. The glass appears to resist its predetermined form and acquire a new autonomy: its surfaces rise, becoming organic, unstable, almost alive.
In both bodies of work, the production process is not simply the means through which the ar-twork comes into being, but becomes the very subject and material of the research. Residue, error, fracture and transformation take on new meaning, bringing the artist’s contemporary practice into dialogue with a tradition of craftsmanship preserved and passed down in Venice since 1888.
The exhibition presents the residency as an encounter between two languages: on one side, Maggini’s exploration of matter, fluidity and the reassembly of fragments; on the other, Orsoni’s culture of colour and glass. It is a dialogue in which past and present are not set in opposition, but meet within the material itself and its continuous potential for transformation.

 

2 September 2026