For over twenty years now, Giberto Arrivabene Valenti Gonzaga has entered the world of glass with the singular desire to reinvent tradition. In particular, he loves to find a connection between the competence of Murano masters and art with a capital "A", created by great artists in the past and a constant source of inspiration. As with the Paolina Borghese, with the bust of Cesare Augusto, with the sleeping Putto ... the impulse to create a glass object comes from the beauty of the art that surrounds it.
In the first months of 2017 Giberto Arrivabene was particularly struck by the work of Lucio Fontana, especially by his spatial concepts: that is, by that idea of cutting the canvas and going “beyond” the canonical space. He finds it in his frequent trips to Buenos Aires where the artist lived and signed the Manifesto Blanco. Back in Venice, Giberto begins to think about the possibility of "cutting" glass in homage to the founder of Spatialism. Not without difficulty, the Fontana Vase was born, a large vase on which one or more deep cuts are engraved that ideally split the glass, revealing the internal color of the vase itself and which is now in production in a limited series of fifteen pieces.
In spite of its reputation as a "dead city", Venice is full of opportunities related to the "contemporary": it has extraordinary museums as well as the theater that hosts the great event of the Biennale. The comparison with modern art therefore continued for Giberto in the wake of the electrocution for the work of Piero Manzoni and Alberto Burri, two artists who are distant in their practice but equally interesting for possible variations in glass. The master Gianni Seguso took up the challenge and created the Manzoni Vase with Giberto : a vase of about thirty centimeters, blown in white glass and wrapped in a skein of hot-applied filaments, to obtain the effect of Manzoni's Acromes. The research on Burri could only focus on fire, the element that inextricably binds glass to the Umbrian artist's Combustion . Again with the precious collaboration of the master Seguso, the Burri Vase was created which, on a black glass base, blends an intense red paste. Lastly, the vase is covered with crystal glass applications that recreate the effect of plastics melted by the blowtorch and highlight the overlapping of the chromatic layers.

These new vases, therefore, presented on the occasion of Glass Week 2019, are in line with the research that Giberto has been carrying out for years: translating consecrated masterpieces of art history into glass, an approach that also becomes a different way to look at art itself, observing it from a new and original point of view, as well as an open homage to the millenary tradition of Murano glass, capable - if stimulated - of constant renewal.