Cristiano Bianchin 1963–

Born in Venice, where he lives and works, Cristiano Bianchin attended the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia, where he studied under the direction of the renowned artist Emilio Vedova and graduated with a degree in painting in 1987. Since 1984, he has exhibited at public institutions and private galleries, and his first personal show was held at the Galleria Bevilacqua La Masa in 1987. As an emerging artist, Bianchin conceives his own artistic language as a reading of experimental poetics involving the possible exchange between the sensuality of seeing and the materials used in art. His first experiments in glass date from 1992 and have been presented in numerous collective and personal exhibitions, such as the one held in 1995 at the Museo Antonio Canova (also known as the Possagno) near Treviso. Bianchin views his work with glass as having an evolutionary continuity based on the classical validity of glassworking techniques, which he confronts with the experimentation of new sculptural forms. His Nidi date from 1996: they are works conceived as mineral architectures whose surface is textured using the refined Murano glass techniques of battitura and molatura. Between 1998 and 1999, he created his Riposapesi, in which the blown glass pieces, black or vividly colored, are synthetically austere. Bianchin was selected in 1995 and 1997 as the Italian artist at the Corning Museum of Glass in New York. He participated at Aperto Vetro, the International Exhibition of Contemporary Glass in Venice, in 1996 and 1998.