Italian, 1955-2019
Lived and worked in Venice, Italy

Laura de Santillana came from a glass dynasty. Her grandfather Paolo Venini founded the glass manufacture Venini, in Murano, and De Santillana?s father then ran the business until the 1980s. After experimenting extensively in the family factory during her youth, began her career as a designer for Venini, then she developped her independant artistic practice.

Since the 1990s, working in close collaboration with skilful glass-blowing maestri of Murano and worldwide, De Santillana has utilized her technical knowledge and care for detail, as well as her impressive experience in the industrial realm, in developing a distinctive design practice. In her work, De Santillana pursued a fascination for hand-made reproducibility and for repetition in the production of series in which a simple set of rules and guidelines generate a host of variations, all unique. Her obsession with order infused the making of her artworks, which precisely balance a contemporary take on inherited, ancestral techniques.

Laura de Santillana has developed a body of works in which the gaze is attracted through layers, attempting to set a focus on deep colors or delicate inclusions. By playing with voids and thickness, opacity and reflections of light, De Santillana ensured that the sheer technicality demonstrated in each piece doesn?t take over the escapism that emanates from her objects.

The work of Laura de Santillana is included in the collections of the V&A Museum, London; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Copper Hewitt Museum and the MAD (all New York); the MUDAC, Luxembourg; and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris; amongst many others.