Lucio Bubacco: Gods and Monsters in Glass

Italian glass artist Lucio Bubacco's work is absolutely amazing. A hundred brightly colored minstrels arrayed across the top of a lampshades, accompanies by gods, demons, mythological creatures and carnival acrobats and musicians.

His pieces challenge our notion of lampwork as a primarily decorative and whimsical, stressing as they do form and plasticity, rather than detailed elaboration and/or narrative content presented as a mini-installation. Bubacco's recent explorations with two dimensional inclusions in blown, solid off-hand and cast glass, burst forth into three dimensional glory, or are highlighted by cold working through and around the images, as he persists in his quest to create a living force in glass.

Bubacco's gallery is absolutely exhaustive: he seems to have done a thousand intricately designed pieces, any one of which appears to be a masterpiece in glass. The dollsome Bibi warns that "some of these are NSFW" which I suppose is true, although I think the corporate world's NSFW policies are not, perhaps, in place to prevent employees from wanking off in their cubicles to miniature glass figurines. But if you know someone from your office who was fired for just such an offense, you may want to wait until you get home.

Here's one final thought about Lucio Bubacco: he encourages people to use the images of his creations as templates for personalized works of art. It's edifying watching an old school craftsman grok the Creative Commons spirit. I wonder if we shouldn't try to make a ToM header out of one of his more surreal, monstrous pieces. Anyone got any ideas?

Lucio Bubacco [Artist's Site]