Venice Glass Week 2021
4-19 september 2021

 

Rosanna Toso, an independent woman, member of a family of glass entrepreneurs and master glassmakers, talented artist and designer. This exhibition is about Rosanna Toso both as a woman and as a glass artist. An avant-garde woman who in the 1970s drove in the canals of Murano alone in her boat. A woman who never accepted any work compromises and successfully made her way in a world that was, perhaps still is, so strongly masculine.

 

Rosanna Toso was born on June 27th, 1941, in Murano. A direct descendant of one of the founders of the Fratelli Toso glassfactory in 1854, Rosanna was part of the 4th generation of Toso committed to the family business. Her journey as a glass designer and artist began with Fratelli Toso in 1964; she became its artistic director in 1973, the first woman with a managerial role in a company that until then had always been dominated by the male component of the family. Rosanna engages in interior lighting, table furnishings, giftware, all designs well contextualized in the young and modern production of Fratelli Toso in those years. She never stops experimenting and also creates one-off masterpieces, or designed to be reproduced only in limited numbers. She engraves freehand, decorates, designs murrine that recall the great Fratelli Toso classics but in a completely new, modern and contemporary way.

 

The exhibition is set up in the spaces of the former Fratelli Toso glass factory. A work space that has been kept as such; the furnaces, the equipment, everything has remained where it was in memory of a past that should serve as a reminder to better define the way forward in the future. An exhibition route with a retro flavor; the exhibition is not just about Rosanna's glassworks. It speaks of what she loved, her family, her friends. It speaks of Rosanna as an eclectic woman who has always inextricably intersected her personal life with her work life, an inseparable intertwining that shines through beautifully in her works that reflect all aspects of her personality.