Geraldina Bassani Antivari’s work moves between mediums and timelines, collapsing the boundaries between the traditional and the contemporary, the reverent and the irreverent. Her practice embraces contradiction: pairing exquisite craft with dry humour, delicate materials with loaded symbols, slow processes with raw, impulsive expression. The result is a body of work that is as seductive as it is subversive, pulling the viewer in with beauty only to shift the ground beneath it.

At the centre of the exhibition is a constellation of hand-blown glass sculptures made by Murano masters, each one unique and unrepeatable. Refusing to use moulds, Bassani Antivari treats glass-blowing as a kind of alchemy - spontaneous, unpredictable, and charged with magic. For her, the mass-production and machinery strip away the enchantment of craft. Instead, in an era of hyper-efficiency, she embraces slowness, imperfection, and care. Each piece, carefully produced as a collaboration between the artist and a maestro vetraio, is saturated with the condensed energy of time and meticulous attention.

These glass forms recall the natural shape of the female breast, one of the most enduring and symbolically charged images across cultures. The breast is often the first shape encountered after birth, carrying associations of nourishment, intimacy, and fertility. At the same time, it is a contested symbol, endlessly reproduced and commodified. Bassani Antivari reclaims it through her process: her breast forms resist standardisation, just as women’s bodies resist singular ideals. None are identical, and each one emerges as its own being, bearing an individual presence yet resonating within a collective. Displayed together, they create a community - a chorus of forms whose differences are emphasised rather than erased.

Their materiality deepens this tension. Glass is at once liquid and solid, fragile and enduring, sensual and sharp. Light travels through the translucent bodies of the sculptures, casting shadows and reflections onto the surrounding walls. In this way, the works extend beyond their own contours, becoming atmospheric presences rather than static objects. The breast, as a symbol of strength and emancipation, is here balanced against the fragility of glass - a reminder that vulnerability and resilience often coexist.

Alongside these sculptures, Bassani Antivari presents a series of embroidered textiles and marquetry panels. Traditional, painstaking techniques, such as silk embroidery and fine wood inlay, are interrupted by blunt words and phrases. Their impulsiveness disrupts the polished nature of the surfaces, forming a lexicon of expression that is uncannily relatable. By embedding such raw language into the craftwork, she destabilises hierarchies of taste and rejects the solemnity often associated with artisanal labour. The vulgar becomes dignified; the decorative gains its own playful voice. Confronted with objects of opulent beauty, we are forced to look again and recognise that beauty can extend beyond aesthetic surfaces, and carry humour, defiance, and urgency. The works wink at the viewer, collapsing seriousness into play, reverence into curiosity, and re-humanising the objects around us.

Ultimately, Geraldina Bassani Antivari proposes a vision of craft as a living act. Far from being a static echo of tradition, craft here is re-activated as a space of intimacy and contradiction. It is fragile yet powerful, deeply personal yet immediately communicative. By weaving together the ancestral and the contemporary, the sacred and the vulgar, the artist creates a body of work that is at once timeless and insistently present. Through this exhibition, Bassani Antivari reminds us that expression does not only belong to polished speech or rational thought, but to gestures, desires, frustrations, and laughter.