Vintage Glass Bowl by Fulvio Bianconi for Mazzega, 1960s

Italian glass designer Fulvio Bianconi was born in 1915 in Padua. He began his career as an apprentice in the Murano glass furnaces under the direction of Michael Pinto and worked with a variety of Milan’s publishers—including Mondadori, Bompiani, and Garzanti—as an illustrator and graphic designer. Bianconi met Paolo Venini in 1946, an encounter that led to his extensive collaboration over several years with Venini’s Murano-based glass house, a pioneer of 20^th-century glass production. With Venini, Bianconi created strikingly colored, simply shaped, often organically inspired objets d’art, vases, as well as lighting, such as the alluringly biomorphic Fazzoletto series (1948) and the multicolored Pezzati vases (1950), which call to mind abstract paintings.

Bianoconi’s midcentury work is included in numerous prestigious collections, including Indianapolis Museum of Art; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; the Museum of New Zealand, Wellington; the Stedilijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; and, in New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art; Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum; and Corning Museum of Glass.

Bianconi passed away in 1996.