Livio Seguso

LIVIO SEGUSO  Italian, born 1930

Born in Murano, Livio Seguso began his life-long affair with glass from a very early age, fascinated by the inexhaustible appeal of that wonderful medium. After having achieved an in-depth knowledge of the traditional glassmaking techniques, and stimulated by his strong artistic sensitivity, Seguso turned to plastic forms, and his research led him to explore with avid interest the world of the great masters of contemporary sculpture.

Livio Seguso reached his full artistic maturity in the late 1970s, when he totally abandoned the Murano glassmaking heritage, however noble, and began to focus on clear crystal, changeable and ambiguous in its transparency, the perfect medium for the artist's uncontaminated imaginative vision. His sculptures manifest themselves in forms of absolute purity, non-mimetic and non-representational of anything, reaching out to seize the principle of a visible event that was undisclosed before that moment, and reveal the personality of the artist. His sculptures thus became Images of Light that seem to adapt themselves to thought only to fade away into a series of oneiric forms.

In recent years, his artistic research overstepped the confines of the medium used, experimenting with other materials like steel, rock, marble, and granite, and, more recently, wood. His artwork also took a departure from his previous rounded or elliptical forms, and he began to conceive volumes in a more geometrical pattern. This, in turn, was to lead to an ideological turning point, not only in the choice of mediums and their poetical potential but also to an ideational transmutation that enhanced the artist's expressive possibilities. The new mediums, always used in combination with glass, exalt both the transparency of this material and the intensity of the light, and their ultimate purpose is to create an ideal union between intellectual rigour and the neatness of the volumes, between the sense of refined elegance and poetic imagination.