Meet the Maker Creating Breathtaking Bronze Works from Found Botanicals
Italian artisan Osanna Visconti uses the lost-wax casting technique to form romantic furniture, mirrors, screens, and other decorative objets currently on view in her first U.S. solo show at Maison Gerard
At her current exhibition at Maison Gerard in New York, Osanna Visconti runs her hand along a cast-bronze bamboo screen, pointing out the irregularities she had intentionally preserved because they add “authenticity and poetry,” she says. “It makes it feel alive.”
A nearby mirror is framed by a beautiful cacophony of cast magnolia branches while the limbs of a monumental magnolia light fixture unfurl across a neighboring wall. “My pieces are heavy but I try to make them look light,” says Visconti, during the opening, which marks her first solo show in the U.S. “You can see that these pieces are made by a woman, I think, because when you look at them, they seem light, but they are very strong and stable.”
Visconti’s practice is all about the tension between the fragility and force of nature. Fragility in that the leaves, flowers, and branches she collects must be cast fairly quickly before they wilt away, and the force of the heat and molten bronze used in the casting process. For more than three decades, she has used the lost-wax casting technique to transform bamboo and other botanicals into mirrors, tables, consoles, lighting, and screens that tread the line between sculpture and functional design (although, for the record, she does not feel she is an artist).
She prefers to work in bronze, as the material “is a live metal, and it changes over the years,” she says. “It kind of mimics the aging of the natural world.” Each piece is cast and assembled by hand in a foundry outside Milan, where Visconti spends four or five days a week overseeing every detail, until at the end of the process, she jokes, “it looks like I came out from a mine.”
Born in Rome, Visconti grew up in a home layered with heirloom antiques and contemporary art collected by her parents. Jewelry was always a passion she pursued and at age 19, she interned in the jewelry department at Christie’s in New York, where she remembers showing trays of jewels to Andy Warhol and Hubert de Givenchy. Returning to Italy, she immersed herself in jewelry design, spending decades refining the labor-intensive lost wax technique. “I decided I would better express my creativity using my ‘tools,’ which are my hands, instead of drawing,” she says.
About 15 years ago, Visconti began translating the language of jewelry into furniture and objects. “I decided to do jewelry in a bigger scale, jewelry for homes,” she explains. Her early furniture experiments caught the right discerning eyes. Tomas Maier, then creative director of Bottega Veneta, commissioned bronze tables and lighting inspired by the house’s signature intrecciato weave as well as a capsule collection of jewelry for his namesake brand. Nina Yashar of Nilufar Gallery began representing her and exhibiting her work internationally. More recently, Visconti has collaborated with the likes of Dior Maison and Diptyque, while prominent designers like Michael S. Smith, SheltonMindel, and Monique Gibson have all commissioned pieces.
To this day, she approaches her larger works with the precision of a jeweler, carefully positioning every cast leaf and branch by hand. Glancing around the installation at Maison Gerard, where her works were styled with pieces from the gallery’s notable collection, she mused, “My mother used to say that you can put an old piece from the 16th century with a contemporary picture made by a living artist, and if there is quality and harmony, they will dialogue well together,” she says. “I think that is what [Maison Gerard owner] Benoist [Drut] has created. It’s why I fell in love with his gallery.”
“Osanna Visconti di Modrone” is on view at Maison Gerard in New York through June 30.