On the occasion of The Venice Glass Week, Libreria Studium presents Lama d’Ombra, an exhibition project by Andrea Morucchio bringing together two sculptures from his historic BLADEseries, begun in the late 1990s, and the new work LAMA D’OMBRA, presented here for the first time.

The exhibition establishes a dialogue between two moments in the artist’s practice separated by more than twenty-five years. It was with BLADE that Morucchio first began his sculptural exploration of glass: slender, blade-like forms in ground glass, suspended in space by essential iron structures. Glass and metal, straight and curved lines, transparency and opacity create a visual tension in which fragility and rigour, light and matter mutually define one another.

The presence in the exhibition of a black BLADE and a red BLADE makes the genealogy of the new sculpture particularly evident. In LAMA D’OMBRA, these two chromatic values come together: the intense, transparent red of the glass encounters the deep black of charred wood. The structure of the earlier works is also reinterpreted. While in the BLADE sculptures the glass element appears suspended, held in space by the curved line of the iron support, in the new work this tension is concentrated within a compact, rigorously symmetrical form: the glass blade emerges from the wood while simultaneously appearing to penetrate it. Line becomes mass, suspension becomes insertion, while the contrast between light and darkness remains at the core of the work.

Produced through the collaboration of Roberto Beltrami of Wave Murano for the glasswork and master woodworker Saverio Pastor for the wooden element, LAMA D’OMBRA marks Morucchio’s return to sculpture and glass through the reworking of a form that lies at the origins of his artistic practice.

Its sharp vertical presence, the almost blood-red intensity of the glass and the black, charred surface of the wood give the sculpture a powerful dramatic tension. Beauty and unease, attraction and threat coexist within the same form. LAMA D’OMBRA was conceived as the official award for the Venice Noir Festival 2026 , translating into sculptural form some of the defining tensions of the noir imagination – mystery, darkness, danger and revelation – and transforming the blade into a symbolic sign: a luminous presence that passes through darkness, cuts into it and brings it to light.

The exhibition also includes an excerpt from a short film by director Tommaso Giusto, documenting the conception and making of Lama d’Ombraand the encounter between artistic vision, material and artisanal expertise that shaped the final work.