Fondazione Berengo and Berengo Studio present GLASSTRESS 2026, The International Biennial Project Dedicated to Contemporary Glass Returns to Venice, curated by Adriano Berengo, Joanna De Vos and Umberto Croppi, with 65 international artists and designers—including Sun Yitian—invited to explore the expressive and transformative potential of glass as a contemporary artistic medium in collaboration with Murano master glassmakers.
The 2026 edition unfolds across two venues: the historic Ca’ Tron Palace on the Grand Canal and Fondazione Berengo Art Space on Murano, presenting a journey through diverse practices and disciplines, from sculpture and performance to design and immersive installation. All works on view are newly created for the occasion, exploring the expressive and transformative potential of glass as a contemporary artistic medium. Among the most notable developments of this edition is the arrival of a new generation of Chinese artists engaging with glass for the very first time, many of whom have never previously worked with the material, resulting in a series of unprecedented experiments born in the furnace.
Sun Yitian’s glass sculpture Take off Only When the Shades of Night Gather (2026) was created during the artist’s residency at a glass workshop on the island of Murano, Venice, and is a translation into glass of the artist’s painting of the same title from 2021; its concept derives from Hegel’s classic philosophical metaphor of “Minerva’s owl,” which proposes that the owl of Minerva takes flight only at dusk, meaning that philosophical reflection always lags behind reality: only when a period of history or a spirit of the age comes to an end can thought settle, review, and complete its examination of the past.
The monumentalization of everyday objects and the mythological translation of mundane still life are new material experiments by Sun Yitian in the medium of blown glass, continuing her ongoing exploration of form and symbols of desire in resin and metal sculpture. In Dionysus‘s Obsessions IV (2026), the artist presents everyday grapes through an approach between figuration and abstraction, magnifying them through extreme symbolization; the densely clustered grapes depart from the original scale of the fruit and become a monumental spiritual vehicle, anchoring the cultural core of the ancient Greek god Dionysus. The mirrored grape particles reflect every viewer standing before them, their distorted and mutated forms simulating the blurred and dizzying sensory illusion after drinking wine, giving concrete form to the abstract sensation of “intoxication.” Grapes are the origin of wine and the material starting point of ecstasy; glass, inherently fragile, ethereal, and pure, symbolizes on one hand the restrained body disciplined by modern order, and on the other hand upholds the Dionysian primitive desire to break free from constraint and indulge in instinct.
Conceived by Adriano Berengo in 2009 as an official collateral event of the Venice Biennale, GLASSTRESS has since played a pivotal role in redefining the position of glass within the international contemporary art landscape, continually inviting artists with no prior experience of the medium to challenge the technical and expressive limits of Murano’s traditional craft.
