Mauro Bonaventura, contemporary glass artist

I am creator and executor of my own works which they are the result of the combination among different concepts, techniques and materials. The combination of these elements is the glass, transparent and bright, ready to be shaped into a complicated web that reflects and plays with the light. To create this complicated structures there is always a big requests of patience, time and technical efforts. I spend many hours drawing and study the glass as chemical material, to experiment how it reacts in different situations, when is heated by the fire and when it cools down in the healing oven.

I like to explore the depths of the unconscious. Believe it or not, we are all prisoners into our personals mental cages. I like very much to explore the special relationship that every human being has within his own brain, so the result are this human figures “fighting” with many contradictions proper of their own nature.

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The artist

Mauro Bonaventura was born in Venice in 1965.

At 18 he graduated with a diploma in electronics. In his search for a job, fate and providence gave him an opportunity to become an apprentice in the age old tradition of Venetian glassblowing.
Right from the start, he fell in love and was mesmerised with the incandescent quality of glass.
His career began with learning the techniques of glassblowing and glass decoration and to date he still remains in the glassmaker’s trade.
It was a turning point for Mauro in 1992 when he was fortunate to be invited by a glass maestro to observe him in lampworking. A new passion struck Mauro when he realised this technique enabled him to explore a new and exciting way of working with glass on a closer and more intimate level.
After months of evening observation Mauro decided it was time to leave the glass factory and concentrate and channel all his energies on the technique of lampworking.
He set up his own studio to become a full time independent artist.
In order to make ends meet, he was involved in typical Venetian production pieces of glass animals, rings, pendants and other objects. However, Mauro had an urgent need to satisfy his creative pursuits in the field of sculpturing work.
In order to achieve this aim, he enrolled in the “Liceo” in Venice which specialises in Art subjects.

After attending four successive years of evening classes in drawing, sculpture, painting and anatomy, Mauro received his diploma in 2003. In the subsequent course of his lampworking career we have seen Mauro Bonaventura’s artistic development growing from strength to strength with his life-like figures often encased in intricate network of cages or spheres.
He continues to hone his skills and perfect his mastery of the medium of glass to create outstanding and thought provoking art pieces.
Participates in many exhibitions mainly in the United States and is published in numerous magazines and catalogues of art newspapers including the Chicago Tribune, Gas Journal, Glashaus, Art & Art, New Glass Review, Corriere della Sera and other.

His works are in Corning Museum of glass, Carnegie Museum of Art, Glass Museum Alter Hof Herding, Hida Takayama Museum of Art, Museo de arte contemporàneo en vidrio de Alcorcòn (Madrid) and other museum and galleries all over the world.

The process of making glass sculptures by Venetian artist Mauro Bonaventura

The author immerses himself deeply in these tangles of bright and colorful synapses, making use of an expressive research that is both intimate and fascinating, involving the spectator in an attempt to lose himself or to lightly extricate himself from the labyrinth of glass threads.