A modern homo faber, able to lend a contemporary reinterpretation to one of the oldest artistic and artisan trades in Europe: a glass artist and craftsman, as he likes to call himself, with an extraordinary ability to transform the material and develop the craft by approaching the worlds of art and design. A young Italian talent, Simone Crestani – maestro of blown lampworking, artist and designer – transforms nature into a crystalline world of poetic wonders.

Simone learned to love glass at an early age thanks to his experience at Massimo Lunardon’s glassworks; driven by his deep love for the glass-blower’s craft, and by his introspective and autodidactic spirit, after ten years’ apprenticeship he decided to open his own workshop in order to develop his innovation and expressive research in a personal manner. Simone indeed works borosilicate glass with an innovative technique he calls hollow sculpting, which allows him to lend an unmistakeable interpretation to the delicate language of strength and fragility, patience and incandescence typical of this material, and to create large works which nevertheless incorporate the smallest details.

Since 2010, Atelier Crestani has been the place which feeds Simone’s creative universe: a mysterious and compelling modern-day Wunderkammer which his art and design production – table art, lighting and furnishings – come out of. This is where his world takes shape, featuring refined bonsai pieces and stupefying trees, majestic deer and crystalline fish, headless hens and sprawling octopi: a world inspired by nature, in which wonder rules and we are captivated by the artist’s creative poetics and expressive talent. By pushing the material to its limits and becoming one with it, Simone continues his very personal search for beauty and the poetics of form, in an infinite ode to nature’s spell, its fragility and wonder.

Invited by Ingo Maurer, on the occasion of Munich Creative Business Week – one of the most important design events in Germany – the artist will be putting on a solo exhibition of his creations at the maestro’s showroom in Munich: Simone Crestani’s artworks and design objects will be on display at Kaiserstrasse 47 from Saturday 3 March until Tuesday 24 April 2018. It is precisely a modern reinterpretation of the Wunderkammer concept which forms the main theme of this exhibition, an image both refined and suggestive which is perfectly expressed by the title Simone has chosen for his solo exhibition: Kristalline Wunderkammer.

Simone Crestani’s Munich exhibition comes on the back of an authoritative award from the Centre du Luxe et de la Création in Paris. This is an organisation which each year selects and rewards international talents whose work’s excellence, innovation, invention, rarity and beauty stand out in the high-end manufacturing sector, and presented him with the Talent du Luxe 2018 award in the Talent de l’Audace category.