Baldwin & Guggisberg are world renowned for their thoughtfully created work. Their eye toward clean lines and use of colors in their designs as well as their dedication to perfection has left a legacy of unparellelled work. Bender Gallery is honored to offer their work to the decerning collector in an environment that showcases their work.
Shown in the gallery are the finest examples of this teams designs and work made to date. Included in the gallery are the three largest frames made to celebrate Venini beng just short of one hundred years and shown at the inangural Venice Glass Week in 2017.
Species Novae is a series whose shapes draw on an older history and tradition, while playing with light and attenuated lines. There is pleasure in the forms, beauty and poetry of these works. They are a celebration of glassmaking, using the Venetian incalmo technique together with battuto cutting, the signature of all our work.
The series highlights iconic and ancient forms that mark the intersection between form and sculpture, juxtaposing both tension and equilibrium, while remaining true to our long association with design and sculptural objects.
The Boat series is an expression of the literal and metaphorical vessels that circulate, and over time gradually transform into artifacts, accruing and forming layers of memory of our past exploits.
The Frames are drawn out of the Boat series, which expresses both notions of journey and object, as well as a heritage of utility through time. The forms are embedded in our subconscious, and express our nomadic tendencies, as symbols of our search for new horizons and unexpected destinations,
We began making the Guardians in direct response to the invitation to participate in the first 'Aperto Vetro' in Venice in 1996. We conceived of them as the powerful courtesans and courtiers of the era of the Doge, prior to the arrival of Napoleon and the fall of Venice as an independent state.
They so pleased and inspired us that we have been making them in evolved shapes ever since. Extravagant, decadent, elegant, beautiful, exaggerated, refined, frail, or fat: they expand our previous strict notions of form.
In essence, they are vessel forms, stretched, pulled and elongated to their natural limit. They celebrate the fabulous elasticity of glass and morph from applied art to abstraction while traversing a single articulated line. They are people, they are flora and fauna, they are long-necked and extravagant birds; whimsical, amused, fleeting and delicate. They are companions, fellow travelers with a different perspective.
The vessel goes to the heart of our work and embodies that most serene place, where we may repose and gaze out at the world. Simultaneously, it is with them that we are able to do our most cutting edge experiments.
Since 1994 we have been combining Italian cold-worked cutting techniques with Swedish blown glass color underlay and overlay. Originally inspired by Carlo Scarpa's work with Venini in the 1930s and 40s, we have taken battuto where - to the best of our knowledge - no one else had gone. Cutting through the thin layers of colour, revealing those underneath, weaving pattern and colour on the one hand, form and texture on the other, the vessel allows new combinations in color and subtleties of form.
They may be a reflection of something found elsewhere in the world, in walls, fields, the bark of a tree, a river flowing downstream at twilight, or simply a pure abstraction of geometry and color.