Silvio Vigliaturo was born on the 3rd February 1949 in Acri (Cosenza), son of Vittorio and Emilia Rende. Here he spent his childhood, and primary school years. At the age of ten, his passion for drawing became evident. His first approach to art education was informal, but it ripened during his years at school. In 1961 his father died, and in March 1962, the family moved to Chieri (Turin). In 1965 he began to frequent Luigi Bertagna’s study; he’d met him some years before in a glass workshop located in the Duomo Square, where he’d experienced his first contact with glass, working after school. Bertagna, an academic scholar of Giacomo Grosso, notices that Vigliaturo had talent. It was colour, however, that attracted him, and it lured him away from the conception of pure academic drawing. A new pictorial concept came into being in 1971 from Bertagna’s academicism, encouraged by an artist from Chieri, Edoardo Ferrero. During the 1980’s Vigliaturo went, for the first time, to Venice; Murano, awoke a strong, latent, interest within him. In Venice, in 1986, he visited the exhibition Futurismo e Futurismi at Palazzo Grassi; he was charmed by the contemporary poetry within the works which had a deep effect on him. From that moment onwards his concept of painting underwent a radical change, marked by a progressive separation from iconography linked to pure realism, to a period of free composition. Vigliaturo began to study Picasso, Mirò, Matisse, Chagall and Expressionism. In June 1989 he exhibits for the first time in Venice at the Galleria San Vidal, at Turin important exhibitions follow one after another: in 1990 at the Palazzo della Regione Piemonte, in 1990 and 1993 at the Promotrice delle Belle Arti - exhibitions organised by the critic Angelo Mistrangelo - and in 1992 at the Galleria Accademia, where he met the Torinese sculptor Sandro Cerchi, professor at the Accademia Albertina delle Belle Arti, who encouraged him to try sculpture. In the mid 1980s, the artist returned to glass, and established a glass workshop which is still located in the Duomo Square at Chieri. He began a period of new experimentation which led him to the creation of glass fusion. The first commissions began to arrive, for the windows of the Parish Church of Santa Maria della Scala; the Cathedral of Chieri. In 1987 Vigliaturo met Monsignor Gianni Carrù who became his iconographical adviser, and a firm friendship was established between them. His first important glass exhibition was held in the Galleria MontMartre in Parma in September 1994, Glass Games of Lights. In July 1994 in Venice, he had a decisive meeting with Adriano Berengo of Berengo Fine Arts who, seeing how innovative his works were became his exclusive curator. In the second half of the 1990’s his painting and sculpture exhibitions followed one after another: between 1994 and 1995 he exhibited in several collective shows organised by the critic Lucio Cabutti, among which one in Palazzo Dugentesco in Vercelli, together with Enrico Colombotto Rosso and Othmar Winkler; in 1995 at the History Museum of Arma della Cavalleria in Pinerolo, in an individual exhibition organised by Regione Piemonte, and in 1996 he takes part in Artissima in Turin. A new market began to open for him abroad, he took part in some of the most important European art fairs: ST’art at Strasbourg, Kunst RAI in Amsterdam, Holland Art Fair in Den Haag, and the Stockholm Art Fair in Sweden.
In 1997 he exhibited with Sandro Chia and Kiki Kogelnick at the Galerie Meringer in Saint Polten, Wien, at the Galerie d’Art L’Eclat du Verre, Les Antiquaire du Louvre, in Paris. The first monograph dedicated to Silvio Vigliaturo, entitled Glass Vibrations, was published by Berengo Fine Arts and edited by Marilio Editori in 1998, in the same year of the exhibition Glass-a possibility of Art from the Berengo Collection, at the Scola dei Tiraoro e Battioro of Venice, after which in 1999 followed the individual exhibition at the Art Fair of Bologna and the exposition Made in Murano. Making Art with Glass in the Hotel Cipriani Venice, for the International Cinema Festival. Vigliaturo continued his experimentation and complex technical research, elaborating a technique in which he could blow glass within the fusion. He presented the results of this working process in Segovia, Spain, in 2000, in an exhibition of the Berengo Collection, and during a conference organised by the prestigious Fundaciòn Centro Nacional del Vidrio where he was invited to illustrate his techniques, confronting his working methods with some the most important master glass-workers from all over the world, such as Richard Meitner, Luciano Vistosi, Marvin Lipofsky, Stanislav Libensky and Dale Chiculy. These were years of intense work, in which the sculptural matrix of his painting became more intense, and international criticism became more and more interested in his original techniques in the working of glass fusion. In 2000 he exhibited in the prestigious Palazzo delle Prigioni in Venice - organised by the critic Enzo di Martino -, at the Paduan Art fair, within a cultural space prepared by Paolo Rizzi and he also participated in the Shangai Art Fair, in China. It’s was a year in which Vigliaturo received high profile media attention: the magazines "Art Leader", "D’A", "Artigianato" and "Alte Vitrie", edited by the Glass Museum of Altare (Savona), dedicated a cover and a long article to the artist. In the same year, his second monograph entitled Glass and I edited by Marsilio Editori came out. In 2001, Vigliaturo was invited as the only Italian artist to the art fair, Hsinchu International Glass Fear in Taiwan, he participated in a conference dedicated to his work, with an exhibition inside the Hsinchu Municipal Glass Museum; he also participated at the "Italy" and "Japan" of Tokyo, exhibiting at Galerie Nichido in Tokyo, and at "Italy 2001"; Quality and Lifestyle in Hong Kong.
Recognition at national level of the artistic initiative linked to glass work, pursued by Berengo Fine Arts and Vigliaturo, arrived with an article in the weekly magazine "Oggi" and with an invitation to appear on the programme Uno Mattina, on Rai Uno. In 2001, the critic Paolo Levi also wrote an article on Arte Mondadori.
Thanks to Berengo Fine Arts, he participated in some of the most prestigious art shows in the world: at the Sofa, New York and Chicago, at Palm Beach Contemporary and at Art Miami, and he was also interviewed by the journalist Hillary Binks for the magazine World Sculpture News, distributed in Asia and in the United States.
In the meanwhile interest for more monumental works developed.
With the help of steel together with glass, Vigliaturo created sculptures of totemic size, located outdoors, and in the historic centres of Verbania and Aosta, during the exhibition in the church of San Lorenzo organised by the critic Paolo Levi and promoted by the Regione Valle d’Aosta.
2002 proved to be one of his busiest periods. Thanks to the exhibition at Palazzo del Capo in Belvedere Marittima followed by a lecture at the University of Cosenza, the artist returned to his native land, Calabria.
He exhibited in Europe in several individual exhibitions: in Spain at the Galeria d’Art Arnau in Barcelona - thanks to Guido Corniolo, responsible for Cultural Resources of the Valle d’Aosta - where he meets Josep Maria Subirachs, Antoni Gaudi’s heir in the huge undertaking of the creation of the Sagrada Famiglia - an exhibition and conference at the Escola d’Art i Oficis del Trebal -; and at Waterford in Ireland at the Artist in Glass, International Glass Art Festival, and at the Rohsska Museum for Design and Applied Art of Goteborg, in Sweden; and in Rivoli Turin, in an exhibition supported by Regione Piemonte and organised by the critic Paolo Levi. During the summer the City of Acri, with the help of the Fondazione Vincenzo Padula and the Galleria Ikonos, dedicated an exhibition to Vigliaturo in the Sala delle Colonne at Palazzo Sanseverino Falcone, re-embracing the artist after his numerous successes, a prelude to the future homonymous Museum. On the occasion of this exhibition Marsilio Editori published his third monograph entitled The Glass Soul. In 2003, Berengo Fine Arts presented his works at Art Dubai, in Saudi Arabia, opening yet another market, that of the Middle East, and at the exhibition Alchemy of Glass: The imaginary bestiary at the Hsinchu Municipal Glass-Museum, during the Hsinchu International Glass Fair. In the same year the magazine "Pagine del Piemonte" edited by Priuli e Verlucca, dedicated a cover of it’s summer edition to one of Vigliaturo’s works together with an article written by the critic Angelo Mistrangelo. In January 2004 the artist returned to the United States: in New York and Chicago he participates in SOFA, in Miami, Art Miami, and in Palm Beach at Palm Beach Contemporary, where he met the master Lino Tagliapietra who expressed his admiration for Vigliaturo’s artistic achievements.
In the summer of the same year, in Piedmont, the Provincia of Torino dedicated an exhibition to him in the halls of Palazzo Cisterna, in Turin, (Central office of the Provincia). In the autumn of 2004, at the National Museum of Philadelphia, Berengo Fine Arts donated one of Vigliaturo’s work, The Noblewoman, for a benefit auction Glass Now, where there were more than 300 works of great prestige created by famous artists working with glass.
2005 proved to be full of dates and events. In January, in the United States he participated in Art Miami and Palm Beach Contemporary, while Berengo Fine Arts continued to propose his works in all of the most important European art fairs.
Thanks to Guido Corniolo’s interest and friendship, the artist exhibited in several museums of modern art in the Baltic countries: at the Museum of Foreign Art in Riga, in Latvia, at the M. K. Ciurlionis National Art Museum of Kaunas, in Lithuania, and at the Lithuanian Art Museum of Klaipeda. The same year "Arte Mondadori" dedicated a monograph to him, which was distributed together with the magazine.
During this period, Vigliaturo meets Franco Dallara - director of the Museum Bernardini-Fatti della Vetrata Antica of San Sepolcro (Arezzo) -, who, together with the town council of San Sepolcro and the Provincia of Arezzo, organised in June 2005 an exhibition entitled New Renaissance of Glass. The show - at the Sala Comunale della Esposizioni in Palazzo Pretorio, in the rooms of the Museum Bernardini-Fatti and the Municipal Museum, where Piero della Francesca’s works are kept - was accompanied by a catalogue in which there are two important critical texts: the first by Vittorio Sgarbi taken from I Giudizi di Sgarbi, published by Editoriale Giorgio Mondadori, and the second by Rosa Barovier Mentasti.
In October of the same year in the Sala Espositiva "La Nave" in Grugliasco (Turin), inside the Parco Culturale "Le Serre", Raquel Barriuso Diez and Vittorio Sacco promoted a show about glass entitled Metaphors and transparencies, with the help of the Città di Grugliasco and Regione Piemonte, where Vigliaturo exhibited his more recent works together with the artists of the Berengo Collection of Murano (Venice).
Sensitive to contemporary artistic trends, the Provincia of Torino chose Vigliaturo as the only testimonial artist, for the XX Winter Olympic Games and IX Paralympic Games of Torino 2006, entrusting him with the creation of the work Marks of Lights which figured a face with the Olympic colours, as a gift to the winning athletes and guest authorities.
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