The Island of San Giorgio Maggiore hosts Ai Weiwei's solo exhibition of glass sculptures and LEGO installations

From Aug. 28 to Nov. 27, 2022, Ai Weiwei ’s solo exhibition entitled The Human Comedy - Memento Mori will be held on theIsland of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, which aims to explore themes such as the relationship between man and nature, between spirituality and the continuing suggestions of the contemporary world. An exhibition in collaboration with theAbbazia di San Giorgio Maggiore - Benedicti Claustra Onlus, Berengo Studio and Fondazione Berengo that will offer, alongside some of his best-known and most recent works in wood and porcelain, a new selection of glass sculptures, the result of an experimentation that Ai Weiwei began in Beijing in 2009 and culminated in a three-year project conceived in Murano.

The centerpiece of the installation, which will be housed in the Basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore, is The Human Comedy, an enormous suspended sculpture composed of more than two thousand pieces of black glass handcrafted by the masters of Berengo Studio in Murano. With a width of more than six meters and a height of almost nine meters, the monumental installation is the largest suspended Murano glass sculpture ever made.

Thanks to the study of light developed by the Luce5 team to enhance its details, the work reveals a cascade of bones, organs and unexpected objects intended to make people reflect on the alienating relationship between man and the natural world.

“This vast suspended black glass sculpture is unique, nothing like it has ever been seen or made before,” commented Adriano Berengo, founder of Berengo Studio and the Berengo Foundation. “Part of its beauty remains a mystery, a human tragedy, a comedy, it arouses a tangle of conflicting feelings and suggestions that each of us must try to unravel in our own way. It is a work that stirs emotions, that forces us to come to terms not only with our own mortality, but also with the role our lives play in the great theater of human history.”

The monumental 2,700-pound"chandelier" debuted in Rome in March 2022 and returns to its Venetian origins, joining eight previously unseen glass works, including Brainless Figure in Glass (2022), a self-portrait conceived through modern technology and hand sculpture; Glass Root (2022), which draws on to the artist’s woodworking after the discovery of remnants of deforestation and natural causes in Brazil in 2017; and everyday objects, such as Glass Takeout Box (2022), a symbol of globalization (first presented in marble in 2015), and Glass Toilet Paper (2022) reflecting the fragility of our society.

Curated by Ai Weiwei, Adriano Berengo and Carmelo A. Grasso, director of the Abbazia di San Giorgio Maggiore - Benedicti Claustra Onlus, the solo exhibition will also showcase a selection of the artist’s most significant works, such as Illumination (2019), an iconic selfie taken in Chengdu, China in 2009 as police escorted him to a hotel elevator; and Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (2016), a provocative series of black-and-white photographs recreated in LEGO bricks. Also featured will be two of Ai Weiwei’s latest LEGO works, Sleeping Venus (After Giorgione) and Know Thyself, both from 2022, and Untitled (After Mondrian), also from 2022.

For info: http://www.abbaziasangiorgio.it; www.fondazioneberengo.org

Hours: Daily 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Closed Tuesdays.

Free admission.

Image: Ai Weiwei, The Human Comedy (2020). Photo by Francesco Allegretto

The Island of San Giorgio Maggiore hosts Ai Weiwei's solo exhibition of glass sculptures and LEGO installations

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