Musée du Verre de Conches in France is marking its reopening with a new solo exhibition by the glass artists Philip Baldwin and Monica Guggisberg in June 2022.

The two artists have worked together since 1980 and are known for their mastery of ‘Battuto’ – an Italian technique to mark the surface of the glass with a grinding wheel.

This exhibition will feature nine installations exploring their fascination with the amphora vessel and its history.

They reveal not just Monica and Philip’s sense of awe at the vessel’s beauty – together with its perfect marriage of form and function – but also its ancient lineage.

This simple jar, with its gentle curves and characteristic, pointed bottom, recurs across millennia and different cultures, from China to India and Siberia to the Levant.

Monica and Philip explain, “Until we started our research for this show, the only amphorae we knew were the iconic ones we find in classical civilizations: Crete, Phoenicia, Greece, Rome. In fact, the earliest ones known to date were discovered in Xianrendong cave in China and take us back deep into the last Ice Age, to c18,900-17,000 BCE. Made by people who were hunter-gatherers, they dispel myths that early peoples did not make pots, and that settled agriculture was the beginning of civilization.”

This will be the first contemporary show at the museum’s new site at Conches’ former hospital building, since it received 5 million Euros for redevelopment.

The Musée du Verre de Conches was set up in 1996 to conserve a rare set of pâte-de-verre stained glass windows by François Décorchemont (1880- 1971). The museum now holds glass art from the late 19th to the beginning of the 21st century.

The exhibition is on from 25 June to 27 November 2022 at: Musée du Verre François Décorchemont, 25 rue Paul Guilbaud, 27190 Conches, France.

Website: www.museeduverre.fr

Image: Baldwin & Guggisberg’s ‘Amphore Métaphore’ (2022) (4.65m L x 1.7m H x 25cm D).