"In this compositional dance, the union between the incandescent blown glass and the bronze is sanctified by the force of fire."

MICHELA CATTAI AT KALPA

It is with great pleasure that we introduce our newly represented Milan-based artist Michela Cattai, and welcome her recent series of works Linfa into the art collection of KALPA Galleries. Cattai graduated in painting from the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice and grounds her creative practice in the old renaissance techniques of Murano glass, making abstract textural artworks with different surfaces and colour-shadings.

Her work and research perfectly integrates within KALPA’s philosophy and aesthetic approach, revolving around the concepts of high art refinement, innovation and intuitive passion in craftsmanship. Indeed Cattai’s intuition has led her to experiment with different forms, shades of colours and materials where her history and identity as a woman and artist converge. 

The Linfa series, with its sinuous and uncanny forms, stands for a noble and intellectual recycling act, showing an innovative dialogue between the two apparently distant materials of glass and bronze.

Exhibited in major institutions worldwide, Linfa features a dichotomy within itself, creating a chromatic dialogue between transparent and opaque surfaces respectively of glass and bronze. The series meets the artist’s intellectual quest to challenge the way of making art in the present, drawing the public’s attention to reflect on the global and very urgent issue of sustainability.

By reconfiguring the scales of space and time, as well as our place as humans in the cycle of Nature, the artist's act of using found and scrap materials to create new works of art reveals an ethical awareness of the essence of objects in contemporary times.

In this fascinating short film entitled 'Incontri Metropolitani', indeed a poetic visual journey across the architecture of Milan and the nature of Venice, bronze and glass melt to create captivating new sculptures.

Cattai's creative process begins inside the historical Battaglia Fonderia Artistica in Milan, a symbol of excellence and tradition in sculpture, and a factory renowned for the use of the ancient technique of lost-wax casting to make bronze artefacts. This is the birthplace of astonishing art projects, a cultural point of reference for young artists and designers, and where the Linfa series finds is rooted. 

In truth, this series is an encounter of two materials, two stories, two worlds. It gathers together the two cultural environments of two distant cities, Milan and Venice: at the Fonderia, the artist remnants remains from other artists' bronze statues and, in the Venetian lagoon, on the island of Murano with glassmaster Andrea Zilio, she merge them with glass.

The result of this union is something unique: Linfa is a series of sculptures with a history and a personality that come to life by reinterpreting the ancient tradition of glass blowing and breathing into new life into the noble material of bronze.

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Credits & Info:

Photos: Vittorio Marrucci © KALPA | Andrea Zilio & Michela Cattai © Laila Pozzo per Doppia Firma 22 - MFCC, FCMA, Living

Video "Incontri Metropolitani": directed by Francesco La Porta, photography Johannes Menghi, editing Tommaso Bagnati, music Davide Cairo, colour correction Fulvio Lacitignola, production ShamelessEye. Premiered in occasion of The Venice Glass Week 2019 Festival at the Teatrino di Palazzo Grassi in Venezia and presented by Autonoma Build Up and Casa delle Parole; screened at the 7th MDFF Milano Design Film Festival and Architecture Film Award in Milan in 2019.

KALPA INSTAGRAM