MURANO.- Galleria Barovier&Toso (Murano, Venice) returns to Palazzo Barovier&Toso in Murano with a solo exhibition by Peter Kogler, on view from 10 September 2026 to 21 February 2027.
The exhibition continues the gallery's programme of inviting internationally renowned artists to engage with glass for the first time, creating new works through a close collaboration with Murano's master glassmakers.
"It was our friend Hans-Peter Wipplinger, Director of the Leopold Museum in Vienna, who first suggested the name of Peter Kogler, during a visit with our gallery's director Dr Mara Hofmann. The idea struck us immediately: Kogler's visual language of endlessly repeating tubes, creating infinite networks, felt like an unmistakable echo of filigrana, one of Murano's oldest techniques, in which fine threads of glass are twisted and drawn into intricate line patterns. We extended an invitation to Peter Kogler, and it is with great pride that Galleria Barovier&Toso now announces this exhibition, bringing his singular vision into dialogue with the glass of Murano for the very first time." – Rinaldo Invernizzi, President, Galleria Barovier&Toso
For his new solo exhibition at Galleria Barovier&Toso, Peter Kogler brings together two worlds that at first appear to belong to opposite ends of history: the immaterial language of the computer and the centuries-old material culture of Murano glass. One of the pioneers of computer-assisted art, Kogler has worked since the mid-1980s with a vocabulary of recurring signs – tubes, ants, brains and globes – that has become immediately recognisable. Developed digitally and repeated across walls, floors and architectural surfaces, these motifs have transformed spaces around the world into immersive networks. In Murano, for the first time in his career, Kogler has translated this vocabulary into glass.
Once Galleria Barovier&Toso introduced Kogler to filigrana, that early intuition deepened into something more than a formal likeness. Rather than simply transferring a digital design onto a traditional material, the collaboration became an exploration of a visual language the two had arrived at, independently, across centuries. Another resonance surfaced in the Barovier&Toso archive, where Kogler came across Ercole Barovier'scheckered designs from the 1950s and '60s: their grid-like structures anticipated, by decades, a logic he would later arrive at through digital technology.
Working at the furnace further transformed the project. Glass, so precise and apparently controlled once cold, becomes fluid and unpredictable under heat. For Kogler, watching Murano’s master glassmakers interpret forms that had originated as his drawings meant relinquishing part of that control. Their knowledge of the material introduced gestures and solutions that could not have been predetermined on a screen. The resulting works are therefore not simply executions of an artist’s designs, but the product of a dialogue between Kogler, the material and the accumulated knowledge of the glass masters. This transformation from digital image to physical object lies at the heart of the exhibition. On a screen, Kogler’s motifs exist as data and light: weightless and intangible. In glass they acquire mass, volume and fragility, while paradoxically retaining transparency. For the artist, this contradiction is particularly significant: glass makes the image tangible while preserving something of the invisibility associated with information itself.
Scale undergoes a similar transformation. The ant, one of Kogler’s earliest and most recognisable motifs, has often multiplied across monumental architectural installations. Through the Murano technique of murrina, it now appears miniaturised and suspended within glass. The sign remains unchanged, yet its new scale radically alters the viewer’s relationship to it.
Throughout the new body of work, Kogler deliberately moves between sculpture and function. Tubular forms evoke vessels; brains and globes become sources of light. Rather than separating art from design, the artist embraces this ambiguity and its connection to the history of glass objects. The works can exist simultaneously as sculptures, vessels or lamps, resisting the need to belong exclusively to one category.
Light runs through the exhibition as a recurring subject. A large aluminium brain threaded with LED is positioned at the centre of the gallery's four historic Barovier&Toso chandeliers, staging a direct dialogue between contemporary vocabulary and Murano heritage. Elsewhere, a suspended glass mobile combines brain and globe, the singular mind on one side, the interconnected world on the other.
The exhibition itself extends this principle beyond individual objects. Kogler has transformed the whole of Galleria Barovier&Toso– including walls, curtains and tables – so that the glass works do not appear as isolated sculptures within a neutral exhibition space. Instead, visitors enter one of the artist’s characteristic environments and find themselves physically immersed in the same system of signs and networks that runs throughout his practice.
Ultimately, glass provides the unexpected link between the ancient and the contemporary. Long before the digital age, glass was already instrumental in the transmission and perception of information: from the lens to the screen and, today, the fibre-optic cable carrying information at the speed of light.
At Galleria Barovier&Toso, seven centuries of glassmaking meet forty years of a computer-assisted visual language, showcasing that tradition and new technology were never as opposed as they may seem, and that an ancient material can anticipate and recreate the present.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue by Prof. Dr Stephan Berg, former Director of the Kunstverein Freiburg and Kunstverein Hannover and, from 2008 to 2025, Intendant of the Kunstmuseum Bonn.
