Michela Cattai is based in Milan and Venice. Graduated in Painting at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice with Fabrizio Plessi, she starts her research on glass attending the Design course held by Ennio Chiggio, thanks to whom she understands the meaning of semantic and semiotic in the context of Italian design. In 1992, she founds the Galleria Michela Cattai in Milan, with the aim to build an im-portant dialogue between art and design. Still bounded to Venice, she decides to deepen the study on glass inside the furnace, experiencing herself the Murano blown glass practice. Learnt the old renaissance techniques and the glass history of the XX centu-ry, Michela Cattai develops the process and through a careful study on color and shape, she realizes abstract artworks that have wrinkled models and different colors shading. Her creativity takes her to a continuos study and experimentation, which leads her to create contemporary artworks that summarize her history and her identity. The result of her most recent research is shown in the dialogue between glass and recycled materials, through which the artist not only goes far from the classical rules of working glass but also reflects her desire to draw the public's attention to a global and very con-temporary message. In these type of process the artist works with the awareness of re-specting the world and creating something which will be a responsibility to future ge-nerations. Michela Cattai’s artworks are presented in international exhibitions and fairs and are part of private and public collections.
MICHELA CATTAI AND HER NOBLE RECYCLE
Getting closer with great sensitivity and respect to the creative waste coming from another artist’s work and reshaping it in a new artifact: this is the focus of the last creations by Michela Cattai. The sculptures, all unique pieces, tell us about a deep love for the glass material, which has its roots in the past, but that expresses itself by using a contemporary language. It’s a noble and intellectual recycle that pushes Michela Cattai, sophisticated and delicate glass artist, to give shape to a new desire of experimentation and to put together, with an innovative meaning, materials that are apparently distant, bringing them to dialogue together. From the continuos need of challenge and from the will of giving the future generations a product that respects our times, thus the Linfa series was born in 2017, dedicated to a totally different and contemporary thought: sculptures that come to life by reinterpreting another noble material, bronze, collected indeed from another artist’s waste. Inside the historical Battaglia Foundry in Milan, Michela collects other sculptures’ waste materials and brings them to the encounter with glass. Michela chooses the Battaglia Foundry because symbol of sculpture excellence and tradition and home of great artists from the milanese territory. “It’s very exciting to pick up the intellectual waste of another artist’s model and allowing it to mutate within a new construction.” A contamination that is not always easy: indeed, the bronze tends to dominate the glass, breaking it, but in the end, thanks to the artist’s intervention and her numerous experimentations, the two materials live together, joined under one common denominator: fire. What’s created from this process of recycling is unique, sculptures with an history and a personality, that hold in themselves not only the continuous research on material, color and shape, but also the need to sensitise the public towards a global and contemporary message. The intent behind the Linfa series, expressed in abstract shapes characterized by the rhythm of their composition, was not to express aesthetic beauty, but rather the dichotomy within the works themselves, creating a chromatic dialogue between the transparent and the opaque. This dialogue is both internal and external: “the inner experience, pure and crystalline, together with the outer surrounding bark, concave where it has been touched by the palm of the hand.”
Milan, November 2018 More info on the project here michelacattaistudio.it
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