Glasstress: Experimentation & Tradition
“Glass is not a craft. It is a language.” — Adriano Berengo
Venice has had a long relationship with glass. For centuries, the furnaces of Murano have shaped the city’s identity as surely as its canals and campanili. This year, Glasstress will take place in Venice from July 12 to November 22nd.
Born on the Water, Born from a Question
Launched in 2009 by Adriano Berengo as a collateral exhibition of the Venice Biennale Arte, Glasstress began with a simple idea: what happens when the world’s most compelling contemporary artists are invited to work in a centuries-old Murano glass studio with complete creative freedom? The answer, it turned out, was something remarkable. Works emerged that could not have been made in any other material, in any other place, by any other hands. The collaboration between international artists and Murano’s master glassblowers, produced objects that were at once deeply of Venice and entirely of the moment.
Berengo, himself a Venetian, understood something that the broader art world had been slow to acknowledge. Glass, in the right hands and with the right vision behind it, is as capable of carrying meaning, emotion, and artistic weight as bronze, marble, or canvas.
Editions Across Time
What began as a single show at the beautiful Palazzo Cavalli-Franchetti has grown into one of the most consistently surprising recurring exhibitions in Venice. Artists including Tony Cragg, Jan Fabre, Orlan, and Fred Wilson were among the first to take up the challenge, creating works that announced Glasstress as something genuinely different from what the art world had come to expect from a glass-focused show.
Subsequent editions deepened the conversation. The 2013 exhibition, White Light/White Heat, spread across three Venetian venues and brought together over 66 artists each finding in glass a means of expression that felt necessary rather than incidental. In 2015, Gotika formed a partnership with the State Hermitage Museum and later traveled to St. Petersburg, with contributions from Olafur Eliasson and Erwin Wurm extending the exhibition’s reach well beyond the lagoon. By 2017, Glasstress had earned the standing to become a fully independent exhibition alongside the Biennale, with Ai Weiwei, Sarah Sze, and Vik Muniz among those lending their vision to the Murano furnaces.
Each edition has felt less like a survey of what glass can do and more like a series of genuine artistic encounters. Each year, artists meet the glass material on its own terms and discover something unanticipated.
A Space Reborn
Perhaps the most affecting chapter came in 2022, when State of Mind was staged at the Berengo Art Space Foundation in Murano. The venue itself told a story as a glass furnace abandoned in 1965, its industrial bones still visible, transformed into a space for art and reflection. There is something fitting about that setting. Glasstress has always been about resurrection, about rescuing a medium from the margins of the contemporary art world and restoring it to the center.
Why It Matters
For those of us who love Murano glass as a living tradition, Glasstress offers something that goes beyond the pleasure of beautiful objects. It insists on a continuity between the ancient skills of the island’s maestri and the restless energy of contemporary artistic practice. It argues, persuasively and without sentimentality, that tradition and innovation are not opposites but collaborators.
In a city as layered as Venice, where every surface carries the weight of history, that argument feels especially true. The light here does something to glass that it does nowhere else. Standing before a Glasstress work in a Venetian palazzo, you understand why artists keep returning and why the conversation between glass and art is far from finished.
The next Venice Biennale Arte runs from July 12 through November 22, 2026. Glasstress exhibitions are held as collateral events; check the Biennale’s official website and Berengo Studio for current programming details.