Venetian fancies

When you imagine the recycle aesthetic of Brazil’s Campana brothers, you wouldn’t naturally place them in a 19th-century, Rothschild-owned manor house in the Buckinghamshire countryside. But that’s where Humberto and Fernando Campana’s new collection of chandeliers is heading next month.

From 1 May, Waddesdon Manor hosts Glass Experiences, an exhibition of new designs by the duo, at its new contemporary art and design gallery, The Coach House.

Coinciding with the publication of a monograph on the Campana brothers’ career, the exhibition comprises vases and lighting created with Venice’s Venini glass studio. Reflecting the Campana bent towards use of found materials, it includes a chandelier made from multicoloured fragmented glass and small glass animals typical of Murano gift shops. Other glass works include seven cocoon-shaped lights, made from pink, aquamarine or green glass and rattan, and Esperança, a group of large chandeliers with glass figures based on Brazilian fabric dolls.

Waddesdon’s commissioned Ingo Maurer chandelier and collection of 18th- and 19th-century chandeliers in part inspired the Campana collection, and according to Fabia Bromovsky, chief executive at Waddesdon, showing such contemporary design chimes well with the manor’s history. ’Waddesdon Manor is on many levels a showcase to the great craftsmen and designers of the 17th and 18th centuries,’ says Bromovsky. ’Therefore, it is appropriate and relevant that we explore some of the best work going on today.’

Glass Experiences: New Designs by Humberto and Fernando Campana opens at Waddesdon Manor on 1 May and runs until 31 October. The monograph Campana Brothers: Complete Works (So Far) is published by Albion and Rizzoli

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