Glass: Transcending Matter. The Cirva Collection
Running from November 8, 2025 to March 15, 2026, Glass: Transcending Matter. The Cirva Collections at the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain de Saint-Étienne Métropole (MAMC+) offers an ambitious presentation of Cirva’s collections to date. The exhibition draws a rich dialogue between design, visual arts, and scientific inquiry through the singular lens of glass.
Glass: Transcending Matter. The Cirva Collections brings together nearly 200 works across nine thematic chapters that range from the mythology and geology of glass to its optical, scientific, and philosophical dimensions. The exhibition is one of the most comprehensive presentations, diving into Cirva’s forty-year collection – including previously unseen archives — sketches, correspondence, molds, and even some failed experiments — that make the creative process as central to the experience as the finished objects themselves.
Since 1983, Cirva (the Centre International de Recherche sur le Verre et les Arts Plastiques) has been inviting artists and designers to their industrial factory, now located in former industrial building in Marseille’s Joliette district, to experiment with a material that many have never before worked with. They are connected with a team of technicians, chemists, and engineers who help to problem-solve and realize the artist’s ideas.
Highlights of the exhibition include James Lee Byars’s Le Petit Ange Rouge de Marseille, an arabesque of 333 equally sized glass spheres arranged across the floor – the deep “Venetian red” was created from a formula that was passed to Cirva by a Venetian master. A series of 77 vases by Robert Wilson, feature a varying thickness and surface treatments that are calibrated to evoke specific natural light conditions: fog, moonlight, a stretch of still water. Jean-Michel Othoniel’s Contrepets, cast from synthetic obsidian produced after Cirva’s team successfully simulated volcanic eruption conditions in a laboratory; And Betty Woodman’s glass vases, developed during her Cirva residency, offer a fascinating counterpoint to her celebrated ceramics practice: the same formal vocabulary, rebuilt entirely in transparency.
The exhibition was co-curated by Stanislas Colodiet, Director of Cirva and a curator previously at the Musée Fabre in Montpellier, and Joris Thomas, Design Valorisation Supervisor at MAMC+. The catalogue, co-published by MAMC+ and JBE Books, runs to 250 pages and doubles as an important reference on Cirva’s history. The exhibition itself travels to Geneva’s Musée Ariana between April and October 2026.
Glass: Transcending Matter. The Cirva Collections is on view at MAMC+, Saint-Étienne, until March 15, 2026. The museum is open daily except Tuesdays, 10am–6pm.
Opening photo credit: Pierre Charpin, Collection Torno Subito, 2000-2001, ADAGP. Vue d’exposition, MAMC+, 2025
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