Milan, Elisa Sighicelli transforms antique glass from the Poldi Pezzoli Museum into dreamlike art

An interplay of transparencies, reflections and visual metamorphoses: this is at the heart of the exhibition Vitroepifanie, a solo show by Elisa Sighicelli (Turin, 1968) that the Poldi Pezzoli Museum in Milan opens to the public from Feb. 21 to May 2025, transforms the museum’s collection of antique glass into a dreamlike universe through the language of photography.

Continuing its tradition of dialogue between ancient and contemporary art, the Milanese museum invited Sighicelli to freely engage with its collections. The artist chose to focus on the fine collection of Murano glass, which includes more than two hundred pieces from the 15th to the 19th century. In particular, his gaze fell on the imaginative forms of the Baroque section and, in a special way, on the striking trick glasses, the so-called surprise glasses.

These objects, designed for convivial games, conceal an ingenious mechanism: they can be filled without the liquid escaping only if a hole in the middle of the stem is plugged. In Baroque Venice they were protagonists of jokes and toasts, instruments of sociability and fun. Today, in Sighicelli’s works, they become almost liquid entities, suspended between reality and abstraction.

A journey between dream and matter

Sighicelli’s photographs explore the visual and symbolic qualities of glass, a material that combines fragility and strength, solidity and transparency. Through changes of scale, blurs and inversions between positive and negative, the artist transfigures trick glasses into fluid, unstable forms that seem to liquefy in space. These objects, created to amaze and deceive the drinker, are transformed into unreal appearances, almost like single-celled organisms observed under a microscope.

The term Vitroepiphanies, which gives the exhibition its title, alludes precisely to this dimension of revelation and metamorphosis: glass becomes the protagonist of luminous epiphanies, in which perception becomes unstable and elusive.

“I was very impressed by Elisa Sighicelli’s reinterpretation of our antique glass,” says Alessandra Quarto, director of the Museum. “A way to bring them to life and to highlight their characteristic of deceptive objects as well as the playful character that made them masterpieces of technique, the pinnacle of what glassblowers could achieve at the time. The artist, enacts a metamorphosis similar to that of the master glassblowers and returns to us a totally new vision of these precious and fun objects.”

An installation designed for the museum

The works on display are designed to dialogue with the spaces of the Poldi Pezzoli, and in particular with the Collector’s Room, located on the second floor next to the room that houses the antique glass. In this cozy and intimate environment, Sighicelli’s photographs envelop the visitor in a suspended atmosphere, in which the past mixes with the contemporary. Deconstructing traditional hierarchies between major and minor arts, between decoration and sculpture, between object and image, the artist questions the very perception of matter. Glass, fragile but eternal, becomes a metaphor for transformation and memory.

This is not the first time Elisa Sighicelli has confronted museum collections. Over the years, she has created exhibition projects inspired by the spaces and masterpieces of institutions such as Palazzo Madama in Turin, Museo Pignatelli in Naples, Castello di Rivoli and GAM in Milan. On each occasion, his practice has developed as an investigation into the relationship between image, light and architecture.

With Vitroepifanie, the tradition of the great Venetian glassworks meets a new dimension of interpretation, where photography becomes an instrument of exploration and reinvention. The Poldi Pezzoli Museum, faithful to the vision of its founder, thus continues to be a place of confrontation between epochs and languages, capable of renewing the gaze on artistic heritage.

Milan, Elisa Sighicelli transforms antique glass from the Poldi Pezzoli Museum into dreamlike art

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