Angelo Zennaro
Born in Venice in 1951, Angelo Zennaro trained at the city’s Art Institute, where he studied fresco-painting and restoration, before moving to the Academy of Fine Arts and then working as a designer for Murano glass-works. The experience of the power and heat of such places would play a large role in his approach to glass as a material. He also began to work as a painter, taking part in various cultural events in the city together with such figures as Alberto Gianquinto, Vittorio Basaglia, Armando Pizzinato, Rafael Alberti, Sebastian Matta and Emilio Vedova. In 1975 he held his first one-man show in Venice, at Galleria ‘Il Traghetto’. Zennaro was also amongst the leading figures of the Fondazione Bevilacqua la Masa, which would grant him the use of a studio at Palazzo Carminati (where he was preceded by a number of important twentieth-century Venetian artists) and award his work a number of prizes. His art has, in fact, been amongst the prize-winners at a number of various exhibitions and is to be found in different museums.
Glass is just one of the materials Zennaro works in; for him, artistic creation is a sort of alchemical act, with no real separation between different forms of expression.
Since 1980 he has also taught painting at an Art High School, dedicating himself to the task with great commitment and enjoying a lively and fruitful exchange with his pupils.
The colour, transparency and light of glass have increasingly attracted his attention, with Zennaro exploring new creative approaches that have produced quite amazing, innovative results. At the end of the 1980s he moved to Mogliano Veneto, where he made the stained-glass windows for the parish church of Cuore Immacolato di Maria. This was a commission which resulted in a substantial transformation the building, with three 6 metre high windows being opened up to flood the interior with colour and light. Glass would thereafter be decisive in the future development of Zennaro’s artistic language. He has focused primarily on ‘glass fusion’, an innovative and original technique which is particularly suited to the combination of architecture and the plastic arts to be found in the creation of stained-glass windows. In this medium, Zennaro has not only produced the windows for the Moglianio church but also the works 7 Sheets of Glass (for the former ‘Silvio Pellico’ school in Mestre), Flowers of Light (in the Banca del Credito Cooperativo in Monastier di Treviso) and now this large installation at Ca’ Pesaro.