Mona Hatoum. Drowning Sorrows (wine bottles), 2004, glass, 15 cm x 200 cm Pier Luigi and Natalina Remotti Collection ph Ela Bialkowska courtesy GALLERIA CONTINUA, San Gimignano / Beijing / Le Moulin

On 8 April 2013, Fragile?, an exhibition curated by Mario Codognato, will open to the public on the San Giorgio Maggiore island inVenice.

The exhibition will feature more than 30 artworks by some of the most interesting international artists of our time who have experimented with industrial and found glass – from Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Beuys, to Ai Weiwei, Damien Hirst, Giovanni Anselmo and Jannis Kounellis, to name a few. This exhibition is part of Le Stanze del Vetro project, a joint collaboration between Fondazione Giorgio Cini and Pentagram Stiftung, developed with the aim of promoting the appreciation of and research in glass made in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. The exhibition will be open until 28 July 2013.

After the success of the exhibition Carlo Scarpa. Venini 1932–1947, curated by Marino Barovier, which welcomed more than 46,000 visitors, Le Stanze del Vetro project continues in 2013 with two important exhibitions: Fragile?, curated by Mario Codognato, and a new monographic exhibition, curated by Marino Barovier, scheduled for the end of the summer and devoted to the production of renowned artist Napoleone Martinuzzi for Venini between 1925 and 1932.

In the context of Venetian glassmaking and its peculiar artisan connotations, Fragile? aims at taking a different, yet equally important, aspect into account, namely the use of glass as a found object, with specific metaphorical and linguistic features.

Instead of the precise traits of manufactured artworks, other aspects will be highlighted, such as symbolic transparency, fragility and resistance, imprecision and smoothness, along with the construction of elements that draw inspiration from reality and contemporary artistic language.

«In the 21^st century, because of historical avant-gardes, visual arts cease to be a sole mimesis of reality through painting and sculpture – states curator Mario Codognato – By using objects and materials taken from the real world and industrial production, a new metaphoric, yet tautologically concrete, dimension is born. Glass, thanks to its widespread use in architecture and its double nature of transparent medium and at the same time barrier, becomes a new linguistic tool through which to create images».

Fragile? displays the creations of some of the most interesting artists of our time, who used glass with diverse and contrasting intentions: from the provoking gesture of MarcelDuchamp of shutting the air of Paris in a transparent ampoule, to the tragic lyricism of Joseph Beuys’s  glass fragments as a witness to the ferociousness of earthquakes, from the transformation of industrial objects into poetical individualities by Luciano Fabro to the ironic explosion of car windscreens in a Pipilotti Rist video.

Seen as a whole, the works and artists exhibited in Fragile? translate the infinite potentialities of glass into unprecedented dialectics which inevitably have to do with our daily existence, as a constitutive element of contemporary artistic language.

Fragile? will gather works by, among others: Michael Craig–Martin, Ceal Floyer, Carsten Nicolai, Lawrence Weiner, Monica Bonvicini, Keith Sonnier, Giuseppe Penone, Rachel Whiteread, Luciano Fabro, Mona Hatoum, David Hammons, Claire Fontaine, Cyril de Commarque, Barry le Va, Joseph Kosuth.

The exhibition catalogue will be published by Skira.

Logistics, visitor services and educational programmes will be provided and managed by ArtSystem, the technical sponsor of the exhibition.