Andrea Tagliapietra

Biography

Andrea Tagliapietra was born in Murano on February 17, 1955.At the age of 14 he started working the glass in a glass factory in Murano island, following the tradition of his father Erminio, at that time one of the most talented glass masters of Salviati & C.
Since he was a boy he worked hard as a glass factory server and attendant and finally became a glass master in 1979.
In 1980, as he like to assert, he “lit up” his sensitiveness and art and started to create works that, as years went by, became popular and successful thanks to their particular expressive autonomy and style, their formal and chromatic balance that were absolutely comparable to those of the greater glass masters of the first half of the twentieth century.

Specialty
Massello sculptures
Calcedonio glass

Exhibitions
He started a in 1983 exposing a delicate Motherhood at Bevilacqua la Masa Foundation in Venice, where some of the greatest contemporary art masters artistically took their first steps
For Andrea Tagliapietra it was the beginning of an exhibition path that took him to Vienna, Linz, Villach, Las Vegas and the prestigious Gallery of Sculpture in Palm Beach, to New York, Chicago, Bern and Tokyo, where a lot of his sculptures are now part of private collections.

Critical Notes
In order to better understand Andrea Tagliapietra’s artistic path, the peculiarity of his work methodology and his approach to a difficult and complex material as glass is, we need to go back to his ideal “initiator”, his glass master Ermanno Nason. From this Picasso interpreter and indefatigable experimenter of noble but extreme forms, as well as chemical and chromatic revolutionary combinations. Andrea was able to get precious secrets and suggestions which have definitely made him one of most important avant-garde sculpture masters of the new generation.
We could go on and on talking about transparence, elements fusion, materials properties, interpretative ability, expressive skill, style light, but, in this way we would rewrite the same critical notes used for all of them who blew and sculptured the history of Murano glass.
But with Andrea Tagliapietra this history can develop and get richer of a new chapter: the origin and originality of movement tied up to sculpture, to the lost and found object , which is now able to claim the right to a space for itself, released from apparent silliness and a placement it s inevitably given.
If the starting point is given by anatomical study, in Andrea Tagliapietra’s sculptures the formal organicity is the arriving point, a kind of organicity obtained by a short of dialogue with the drawings that the artist himself chooses to interpret.
It is clear that here we don’t want to talk about retail market production, which glass masters are sometime subjected to, but in Andrea Tagliapietra’s works it is love for research that prevails: when the desired result is obtained, when beauty gets form and body, contemplation annuls any possible discussion.
Andrea is today an artist who has reached his full expressive maturity, he is an executor able to follow and keep fait to a deep mental speech: drawing out of the furnace great bodies of glass weighing tens of kilos just helped by the cane, handling them skillfully in a few seconds, getting out of them forms that perfectly represent ancient and modern, past and future is a virtue granted to few: to those few that in the fire perceive the presence of an angel.