Matei Negreanu

"Although he avoids any discussion of the conceptuality of his work - he is surely right because after all it is up to the voyeur to decide on a work and I gladly do so with his - Matei Negreanu likes to talk about the glass technique. He has a great mastery of this material and explores all its potentialities with an obvious and insatiable pleasure. He can talk for hours in front of an audience that understands nothing about glass and it becomes exciting. Because he knows all the constraints and pleasures of working with it and because it is also a material of light and opacity, of softness and roughness, quite simply a material of seduction.

He studies its fragility and resistance and tries to overcome it with each work he creates. Even if he admits sometimes that he would like to escape from glass, to work with other materials, he knows that he will always come back to it to master it better. Matei Negreanu may seem reserved about the aesthetics of his work. If he is a great expert in the handling of glass, he also has a great notion of beauty, certainly classic but mainly contemporary. The expression of beauty comes to him constantly in front of objects or landscapes. So we understand better that he places himself as a great observer of forms and lights and that all his work is affected by this. There is always in his sculptures and even more so in his latest work, a resonance between opacity and transparency of the material in the play of cracks or shards, an echo between elegance and harmony of compact or slender forms and a dynamic between poetic and spectacle with the encrustations of lush colors or unusual materials in the glass".

- Marie Bonnal, art critic, Extract from the catalog of the Matei Negreanu exhibition, Editions Galerie Capazza, 2013

“I am the director of my glass. By introducing the lead, I do not let the glass act alone, with its qualities He is so splendid that our intervention on him would be zero. It's not the polished block that interests me, it's the light. I direct it, I create passages for it, I intensify it where I want. I give it shadows and color tones. There are surfaces that I polish, others that I break, that I dig. Basically, I don't care about glass, I exploit it. I use its inner curves".

- Matei Negreanu

Born in 1941 in Bucharest, Romania. Graduated from the School of Fine Arts in Bucharest. Lives and works in France since 1981.

1995 Knight of Arts and Letters.

Public collections

Museum of Decorative Arts, Athens, Greece

Ulster Museum, Belfast, Ireland

Museum of Decorative Arts, Bordeaux, F

Decorative Arts Museum, Bucharest, Romania

Unterlinden Museum, Colmar, France

Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, USA

Kunstmuseum, Dusseldorf, Germany

Museum of Design and Contemporary Applied Arts, Lausanne, Switzerland

National Fund for Contemporary Art, Paris, F

Mobile Museum of Art, Mobile, AL, USA

Museum of Decorative Arts, Paris, F

Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Autotran Museum, Rosmalen, Netherlands

Saxony Collection, San Francisco, USA

Hokaido Museum of Modern Art, Sapporo, Japan

Glass Museum, Sars-Poteries, France

Hoya Industry collection, Tokyo, Japan

Museum Bellerive, Zürich, Switzerland

Kunstammlunen der Veste, Coburg, Germany

Ernsting Museum, Coesfeld-Lette, Germany

Pilkington Glass Museum, St Helens, Great Britain

Kunstmuseum, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Canada

Selection of exhibitions

2022 What glass can do, Capazza Gallery, Nançay, F

2019 Exhibition at the Clara Scremini Gallery, Paris, F

2015 Guest of honor at the 3rd glass biennial in Colombes, F

2014 Gallery Yolenn White Gallery, Geneva, Switzerland

2013 Capazza Gallery, Nançay, France

2012 International Glass Gallery, S. Lechaszynski, Biot, F

Shards! The Museum goes to glass, Wruth Museum, Erstein, F

European Glass Contest, Bornholm, Denmark

2011 Shards! The museum turns to glass, Wruth Museum in Erstein, F

2009 Exhibition in the city, Etienne gallery, Oisterwijk, Netherlands

Regional Council of Alsace, Biennale of Strasbourg, F

2008 Glass at the Orangerie, Versailles, F

Clara Scremini gallery, Paris, France

2007 Course, Museum of Goms, F

Capazza Gallery, Nancay, France

2004 Pavilion of Antiques and Fine Arts, Clara Scremini Gallery, Paris, F

The Belfries of Culture around Rembrandt, Rodin, Picasso, Avesnes sur Helpe, F

Glass sculpture, square de Vergennes, Paris, gallery S. Lechaszynski Biot, F

2003 House of Glass, Puy-Guillaume, F

2000 Lines of silence/artists residence, glass museum of Sars – Poteries, F

1999 Global Art Trienal, Borgholm, Sweden

1996 Venezia Aperto Vetro, Corer Museum, Venice, Italy

1994 A new century in European Design, Metropolitan Museum, Tokyo, Japan

1992 Cristallomania, Tamayo Museum, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Monterey, Mexico

1991 Salon Découvertes (Fiac), Clara Scremini Gallery, Paris, F

1990 Neues Glass in Europ, Glass Museum Hentrich, Dusseldorf, Germany