Not Vital: 700 Snowballs

• LOCATION: Isola di San Giorgio, Fondazione Cini, Venezia

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On 1st June 2013, the exhibition Not Vital: 700 Snowballs, curated by Alma Zevi, opens to the public on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice. The exhibition is sponsored and promoted by Pentagram Stiftung, a Swiss private foundation dedicated to the study of glass. 700 Snowballs is an installation consisting of 700 individually blown glass balls which bear striking resemblance to snowballs suspended in air. The snowballs rest directly on the floor, evenly and randomly spread. As each snowball is hand-blown by Vetreria Pino Signoretto in Murano, no two are identical – just as natural elements are never exactly repeated. The installation creates a place of meditation, evoking the metamorphic, transformative and cyclical processes of nature. The luminous and reflective qualities of glass simultaneously reflect both the dense and yet ephemeral nature of snow. This mirrors the tension between the organic form and the inorganic material, between the durability of the artwork and the fragility of the elements it evokes. In 2012, Pentagram Stiftung launched Le Stanze del Vetro in partnership with the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, also on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice. 700 Snowballs, alongside the exhibition Fragile? concurrently on view at Le Stanze del Vetro, brings the visitor through a comprehensive mapping and understanding of the use of glass in contemporary art.