Art of Venice art glass. Ibiscus flameworks available in our gallery

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MURANO GLASS LAMPWORKS

Our youngest member in Art of Venice gallery is Igor Balbi of Ibiscus glassworks. He is making waves in the glass world with his innovative ideas and techniques.

This young glass artist looks for the unexpected in his work, and makes a deliberate effort to cultivate surprises. Balbi is very in tune with the natural world but still has a touch of surrealism that makes him stand out from the rest. Ideas are driven by subconscious fantasies and dreams.

He truly has an eye for color schemes. It is best shown in his beautiful blown glass goblets; they are the perfect mixture of colors; some recent work features layering of colors to achieve a specific texture with several color gradients. The resulting surfaces are translucent.

Igor was born in Murano in 1973. He grew up in a family of lampworkers. Igor often visited his father's studio, and learned flameworking in the most natural way, just playing with glass as every child plays with toys. His father and uncle taught Igor all their techniques and secrets inherited from generations of family glassmaking. Igor continued perfectioning thìs technical legacy, also developing many new torchworking techniques never tried before, as filigree, incalmo, sommerso, blown glass.

Another important challenge for Igor is to improve the size of his works; his goal is to fill a natural gap between the flameworking in soft glass and the furnace glassblowing.
Igor works only with Murano soft glass, using his own tools, often hand made by himself.

2006 SCHEDULE

Teaching lampwork and blown glass at the International glass center A. Zanetti
Winter: Cooperation with Lucio Bubacco (blown lampworks)
March: Exhibit "Disegno in Vetro", Murano
February: Exhibit "Scherzi di Vetro", Murano
July: Special guest summer programs of the International glass center A. Zanetti

COD	TITLE	PRICE US $
S0122	"Allegro" Murano glass sculpture
C0194	"Fiore pazzo" lampworked Murano glass goblet	460
C0115	"La gabbia" lampworked Murano glass goblet	1490