GLASSTRESS 2026, Ca' Tron and Fondazione Berengo Art Space, Venice, Italy, July 12 – November 22, 2026

Glass is never innocent. It seduces, glints, cuts, shatters, preserves. What happens when artists stop treating this fragile material as decoration and start using it to carry tension, metamorphosis, loss?

GLASSTRESS 2026 returns to Venice and Murano. Founded in 2009 by Adriano Berengo as a collateral event of the Venice Biennale, GLASSTRESS brings together more than fifty artists this year, all working alongside the master glassmakers of Murano. Curated by Adriano Berengo, Joanna De Vos, and Umberto Croppi, the exhibition unfolds across two sites: the historic Ca' Tron on the Grand Canal and the Fondazione Berengo Art Space, a former glass furnace on Murano. Artists from across disciplines join the island's glassblowers to ask what glass can be today: skin, body, fall, memory, temptation, wound.

Vanmechelen presents I Never Lost Paradise, a chandelier nearly five metres tall, the product of more than a year's work with several Murano glass masters. The piece takes the shape of a Venetian chandelier and then refuses everything that shape is supposed to mean: no ceiling ornament, no settled light. Glass serpents coil around a bronze human bone — temptation, yes, but also the moment something stops being wild, the point where one world is abandoned and another begins.

"Glass taught me fragility and risk," says Vanmechelen. "Every gesture can fail, and every failure becomes part of the material's truth."

Vanmechelen has been part of GLASSTRESS since its very first edition, building a relationship with the project that runs deep — as an artist, and as curator of several editions. In I Never Lost Paradise, Adriano Berengo sees the pattern that has always defined him as an artist: "I Never Lost Paradise is steeped in symbolism and storytelling, but also in science and spectacle — who else but Koen would push us, quite literally, to such new heights."

A second version of the chandelier features, during the Biennale, in Vanmechelen's solo exhibition We Thought We Were Alone at Palazzo Rota Ivancich. In Murano, the work returns to where it came from — fire, glass, craft — standing now at the center of the history that shaped it.

Other artists in GLASSTRESS 2026: Marina Abramović, Ai Weiwei, Manal Al Dowayan, Monira Al Qadiri, Allora & Calzadilla, Vanessa Beecroft, Monica Bonvicini, Stefano Cagol, Edoardo Callegari, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Ornella Cardillo, Judy Chicago, Zheng Chongbin, Tony Cragg, Laura De Coninck, Ida Ekblad, David S. Eley, Leandro Erlich, Jan Fabre, Fariba Ferdosi, Christian Fogarolli, Massimiliano, Doriana and Lavinia Fuksas, Josepha Gasch-Muche, Gelitin, Abdulnasser Gharem, Fathi Hassan, Marlène Huissoud, Martin Janecký, Oda Jaune and Wu Jian'an, Marya Kazoun, Karen LaMonte, Delaine Le Bas, Simone Mannino, Paul McCarthy, Yue Minjun, Serge Mouangue, Moataz Nasr, Adrian Paci, Cornelia Parker, Anne Peabody, Penzo+Fiore, Jaume Plensa, Laure Prouvost, Arne Quinze, Fatinha Ramos, Tobias Rehberger, Maria Roosen, Thomas Schütte, Sean Scully, Marinella Senatore, Wael Shawky, Shan Shan Sheng, Chiharu Shiota, Joana Vasconcelos, Ronald Ventura, Ernests Vītiņš, Ziping Wang, Rose Wylie, Erwin Wurm, Guan Xiao, Raed Yassin, Dustin Yellin, Sun Yitian and Qi Zhuo.

EXHIBITION FACTS

GLASSTRESS 2026

Ca’ Tron, Venice and Fondazione Berengo Art Space, Murano

12 July - 22 NOV 2026

Curated by Adriano Berengo, Joanna De Vos en Umberto Croppi

www.fondazioneberengo.org | www.berengo.com