Irene Cattaneo

Exhibition view, Irene Cattaneo, ‘Il Giardino Segreto’ with ‘Snowdrop’ floor lamp’, 2026
COURTESY: © The Artist & Galerie Gastou / PHOTOGRAPH: © Enrico Fiorese

TUCKED BEHIND A quiet canal, around the corner from the ornate Palazzo Fortuny where Austrian sculptor Erwin Wurm’s surreal objects are currently on display, is a small garden, jewelled with greenery and flowers. Here, all summer long, a new collection of dream-like sculptural furniture pieces designed by Italian designer Irene Cattaneo held court, creating an intimate stage for storytelling. As the show, titled ‘Il Giardino Segreto’, was closing, with several pieces lined up for display at PAD London and Design Miami Paris, The Design Edit caught up with the her. 

Exhibition view, Irene Cattaneo, ‘Il Giardino Segreto’ with ‘Queen of the Night’ bench, 2026
COURTESY: © The Artist & Galerie Gastou / PHOTOGRAPH: © Enrico Fiorese

Sitting on a shimmering opaline bench, part of her Queen of the Night collection, Cattaneo explains that Venice has been the catalyst for her reinvention as an artist and designer. Raised in Germany, she initially studied finance and economics in Milan. A stint with LVMH, however, inspired her to take an MA in Design and Management at London’s Central St Martins, allowing her to move towards the creative sector without quite believing it was possible to make art her profession. After graduation, Cattaneo moved to New York to work in the fashion industry, where as a side-line, she began to design a collection of bags that incorporate a light. She says, “I have always been obsessed with light.”

Irene Cattaneo, ‘Les Bienfaits de la Lune’, 2025
COURTESY: © The Artist & Galerie Gastou / PHOTOGRAPH: © Edouard Auffray

Disillusioned with the fashion industry, she then moved to Beirut and found satisfaction working with local artisans on a range of design projects, but it was the Covid pandemic that brought her back to Venice. Here, the changing light of sky and water became a prevailing stimulus and the forced hiatus offered her an opportunity to reflect. An old friend, artist Marcantonio Brandolini, managing director of the renowned Murano glass business, Laguna-B, (founded by his mother Marie Brandolini in 1994), invited Cattaneo to visit the glassworks and see the master craftsmen in action. “I knew immediately that I wanted to work with glass”, Cattaneo says,”for its iridescence, translucency and mirroring effect.” Working on a computer to generate forms, Cattaneo began to create a series of designs for cloud-shaped lights. She comments, “The clouds were first because all my work starts from an emotion. I would look at clouds as a child, fascinated by the way they always transform and never die, and I wanted to be able to explore an unending series of possibilities with this new medium.” It also intrigued her that, just like clouds, as soon as you try to fix or control glass too precisely, it loses its vital charm.

Irene Cattaneo in the workshop
COURTESY: © The Artist / PHOTOGRAPH: © Ilaria Zago

She became entranced by the process, spending time in various Murano furnaces, working with different masters, exploring the medium’s potential. “Because I was there all the time, I could see how the masters worked, but I also had access to the archives. There I found out about ‘sommerso’, the Murano technique for layering coloured glass within clear glass.” Working with two noted masters – Andrea Zilio and Fabiano Amadi – she was able to push the technique to generate her red-tinged ‘Fire-flies’ lights, while with the ‘incamiciato’ technique she could produce the large, soft, multilayered petals of her ‘Snowdrop’ lights. Private commissions and her own fascination with languages – she is fluent in four – spurred her to put words on her pieces, encouraging her own preoccupation with storytelling. Soon she was being asked to make larger and more substantial pieces of furniture, requiring her to become adept at managing the interrelationships between the glass masters and other craftsmen – the bronze foundry technicians and carvers of marble – who are increasingly involved in the creation of her multimedia pieces.“I did not decide what I was going to do,” she says. “One thing just led to another. I certainly did not realise I was going to be creating immersive environments!”

Exhibition view, Irene Cattaneo, ‘Il Giardino Segreto’ with ‘Effi Briest’ swing set, 2026 (detail)
COURTESY: © The Artist & Galerie Gastou / PHOTOGRAPH: © Enrico Fiorese

Even as her pieces grew more fantastical, drawing on the dreams and desires of her clients, it was important for Cattaneo that they were rooted in function: “Function offered a kind of validation but also took away the pressure to be highly conceptual, and allowed the works to be more emotional.” This also enabled a physical intimacy between audience and artwork which is just not possible with painting or sculpture. You can push-off on the Effi Briest swing, with its lyrically intertwined bronze branches and Queen of the Night flowers, summoning in your imagination the world of that tragic heroine at a moment when she was free and full of the exhilaration of childhood.

Irene Cattaneo & Fondazione Berengo, ‘Forget Me No-w/t’, 2024
COURTESY: © The Artist

Two years ago, Cattaneo was invited by the curator and creative entrepreneur Nadja Romain to take a leap into the dark. Given carte blanche to create an entire world of objects for the inauguration of Romain’s new Venice gallery, Lo Studio Nadja Romain, Cattaneo unleashed her love of wordplay, producing a series of pieces inspired by Venice, and its shifting weather, under the title, ‘Meteomorphosis’. The materials for the objects were inspired by their names: the ‘Aqua Alta’ bench is made from travertine marble, evoking the flood waters of Venice; by contrast, the ‘Sink In Venice’, a basin formed from a thick rounded dark cloud-like mass of Grigio Camico marble, plays with the idea of Venice sinking, of what is heavy and what floats. Liberated to use furniture design as a medium for personal narratives, last year she accomplished two further solo projects, each inspired by literature dear to her: ‘Through the Looking Glass’, exhibited at Ashlee Harrison’s gallery Thirty 8 East in New York and ‘Les Bienfaits de la Lune’ (The Blessings of the Moon), inspired by Baudelaire’s prose poem, which was staged at Galerie Gastou in Paris. The atmosphere of heady romanticism, partly influenced by Cattaneo’s plant-inspired curving lines and playful sense of scale, reminiscent of Claude Lalanne, is enhanced by her use of natural materials and ancient production techniques, yielding unique tactile pieces. This homage to the moon as a maternal force was created while Cattaneo was pregnant with her first child.

Exhibition view, Irene Cattaneo, ‘Il Giardino Segreto’ with ‘Effi Briest’ swing set, 2026
COURTESY: © The Artist & Galerie Gastou / PHOTOGRAPH: © Enrico Fiorese

The softly suggestive pieces gathered in Venice, suffused with nostalgia and redolent of childhood and its intensely inhabited imaginary worlds, reflect a later stage of motherhood. Ironically, the Effi Briest swing alludes to an agonising separation between mother and child, refracted through Theodor Fontane’s 1894 novel and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1974 black and white movie, while the exhibition’s title, ‘The Secret Garden’, evokes Agnieszka Holland’s 1993 recreation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1911 children’s classic, about two neglected and traumatised children, a favourite film for Cattaneo. Jeopardy is all around. But in each case, the garden is a healing place, and maybe that is the point – with the Snowdrop lights an homage to Cattaneo’s mother, piercing the snow with new hope, there is a sense that what The Secret Garden offers is the nurturing of resilience, and the invitation to dream and imagine.