Observe Laura de Santillana's trysts with glass, light and tradition at Ippodo Gallery

Ippodo Gallery proudly presents Laura de Santillana: Echoes of Her Gaze, Impressions of Tokyo and Kyoto in Glass, the artist’s second posthumous solo exhibition in New York. A curation of over 25 blown glass artworks evoking the dichotomy of Tokyo’s neon lights and subdued glow of Kyoto’s aesthetics is on view from May 15 - June 29, 2024. Representing the later years of her career, this collaboration between the de Santillana Estate and Ippodo Gallery includes artworks from Venice and those exhibited exclusively in Japan.

Deeply inspired by the ingenious craftsmanship of Japanese architecture, this series of glass tablets draws together the vibrant colours that de Santillana saw in Tokyo’s bustling nightlife districts with the traditional modesty of Kyoto, where she felt a natural fondness of ancient Japanese culture analogous to the grand history of Venice.

De Santillana innovated Venetian-Murano glass art techniques passed down through her grandfather's lineage, the legendary Paolo Venini. Under his tutelage, the Italian artist developed her vision of what could be expressed in glass. The sculptural artist used innovative techniques, masterful compositions of colours, and several formal and artistic gestures explored during her early career in Murano, which she later perfected with collaborators in the Czech Republic and the United States.

The great bridging power of de Santillana’s glass is the sensuality of her artistic vision: she saw within glass beauty and tenderness that another has brought to life with such vivid effect. A transformation occurs as light is diffused in colour or passes through the translucent glass. What was once light becomes distorted, refracted or purified.

De Santillana’s works, imagined first in sketches and then executed at her direction, are the product of maestros and engineers who blow and manipulate the folded glass at extreme temperatures. Meticulously formulated colours made from natural pigments or metals are inserted during the firing process, only realising their true brilliance once pulled from the fire.

“The glass tablets are envelopes in which the light lives and refracts; there is the surface work, a skin. This light that is incorporated in the object becomes the body of the object. Light is not outside, it’s inside, a liquid frame between the inside and the outside,” shares de Santillana.

The artist has exhibited throughout Europe and the US, as well as with the Ippodo Gallery in Japan (at both Ippodo Gallery Tokyo and for the 280^th anniversary of Kyoto-based textile house Kondaya Genbei). Her works are in prominent collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Corning Museum of Glass in New York, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston in Texas, Museum of Fine Arts Boston in Massachusetts, Los Angeles County Museum of Art in California, and many more.